{"id":751,"date":"2009-03-05T18:28:17","date_gmt":"2009-03-05T17:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=751"},"modified":"2009-04-30T12:29:35","modified_gmt":"2009-04-30T11:29:35","slug":"wolfram-alpha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=751","title":{"rendered":"Wolfram Alpha"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my informants told me to expect something big from Wolfram Research in the near future but didn’t tell me what it was. No matter how hard I tried, she wouldn’t give me any details apart from ‘Stephen is very excited about it<\/em><\/strong>‘ and ‘A surprise announcement will be coming soon.<\/strong><\/em>‘\u00a0 She sure knows how to get me intrigued.<\/p>\n

Well, now the secret is out…sort of.\u00a0 Stephen Wolfram has just made a blog post about a project he has been working on for a few years called Wolfram Alpha.<\/p>\n

\"Wolfram<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ll be honest with you – I’ve read the blog post and I’m still<\/strong> not sure what this is all about but with phrases like:<\/p>\n

…Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they\u2019d quickly be able to handle all these kinds of things. And that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

and<\/p>\n

It\u2019s going to be a website: www.wolframalpha.com<\/a>. With one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I am even more intrigued. Nothing is live yet – this is just an appetizer announcement but I am really<\/strong> looking forward to finding out more about what this is all about.<\/p>\n

Any thoughts?<\/p>\n

Update (18th March 2009): <\/strong>Doug Lenat has also seen a demo of the system and has discussed it in depth at Semantic Universe<\/a> including the sort of questions that Wolfram Alpha won’t <\/strong>be able to answer.<\/p>\n

John Hawks wonders if Wolfram Alpha will make bioinformatics obsolete<\/a>?\u00a0 I don’t know enough about bioinformatics to comment but it’s an interesting article.<\/p>\n

Update (9th March 2009): <\/strong>Someone with better connections than me has seen it in action.\u00a0 Check out this report<\/a> for more details.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my informants told me to expect something big from Wolfram Research in the near future but didn’t tell me what it was. No matter how hard I tried, she wouldn’t give me any details apart from ‘Stephen is very excited about it‘ and ‘A surprise announcement will be coming soon.‘\u00a0 She sure knows […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,30,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematica","category-the-internet","category-wolfram-alpha"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-c7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=751"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1190,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751\/revisions\/1190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}