Wolfram Alpha getting ready

Stephen Wolfram gives a talk about Wolfram|Alpha himself:



It looks truly impressive.

It's a sort of public interface for a Mathematica-driven system that automatically generates the most natural calculations (and graphs) related to the words or sentences that you write in plain English (and whose detailed structure is taken seriously), using millions of lines of Mathematica code and tons of curated data.




See also:

• the whole 100-minute lecture at the Harvard Law School; the video above is an excerpt
• the secret behind the Wolfram Alpha computational engine
• a video showing Wolfram Research LLC preparing lots of computers in a room

Screenshots of search/computational queries:

• rich W|A title page, embeddings, recurrence equation, integration, Bessel functions, water at a pressure, geography, French GDP, stocks, housing starts, local temperatures, family relationships, life expectancy, obesity and age, internet users in Europe, an apple, Bob

It's all amazing. And Google wants to compete with a gadget that can only draw the unemployment rate and population in a county? ;-) Don't be ludicrous. Wolfram clearly has no competitors in his discipline so far.

Stay tuned. Wolfram|Alpha will be started this month.