Wolfram Alpha: Smarter Than You

by Nik on May 19, 2009

The Information Age is upon us. The barriers to publication have been removed, and the information storage density increases of the last half century mean that we’re able to generate and store an incredible amount of data. The Encyclopedia Britannica, one of the largest English language printed encyclopedias, has about 40 million words in 32 volumes. That requires a considerably sturdy bookshelf to contain. Stored digitally in plain text it might consume about a quarter of the capacity of a 1 GB memory card in your camera, which is smaller than a postage stamp. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is at least an order of magnitude larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica.

We have all this information, and behind that an even larger amount of data. How do we deal with this? That’s easy: Google. We turn to sophisticated search engines that look at all the data we’ve collected and rely on them to give us what we’re looking for. Google works amazingly well, and even more amazing than that, it somehow produces results in fractions of a second. It’s almost as if Google knows what you’re going to ask before you ask it. Google, however, is not perfect. It can get you information, but it’s up to you to know what to do with it.

Wolfram Alpha contemplates major US Cities

This is where Wolfram Alpha comes in. The web has been ablaze with talk about Wolfram Alpha since its launch on Friday. It seems that everywhere I turn, I hear somebody whispering Wolfram Alpha. What is it? Nobody really knows yet.

That’s not entirely true.

We do know what it isn’t. It’s not a search engine. Sure, it looks like one, but if you go to it expecting to get something Google-like out of it, you’ll be disappointed. Wolfram Alpha is an information engine. Under the hood, Wolfram Alpha is powered by historical and live data sets from a wide variety of sources, all hooked together with software called Mathematica, the brain-child of British physicist Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram believes that computational methods can do more than deal with known physics; he asserts that, by iteration, a computational engine could even discover new physics. (This is a vastly simplified summation of his work.)

Wolfram Alpha is an extension of this thought. When you pose queries the software looks through its database to figure out what you’re asking about, and then returns information about that subject or subjects. It also performs computations based on the data. For example, if you enter “Los Angeles, New York”, it figures out that out that you mean New York City, and displays a variety of data about the two cities, such as population, elevation and current time. Additionally, it calculates the distance between the two cities, and estimates how long it might take to fly between them. If you wanted to know more about the population of those cities, “population Los Angeles, New York” generates a graph with historical population data for both cities. Wolfram Alpha uses its computational abilities to create new information. John C. Dvorak calls Wolfram Alpha “the CIA World Factbook combined with a calculator.”

To make the site useful, we must forget our conditioned search engine behavior. Wolfram Alpha’s information creation capabilities also make it difficult to know what it might be able to come up with in the future, especially as new data sources are entered. Try it out for yourself, and read more about Wolfram Alpha here: