Dr. Know

The other day I stumbled upon an “answer engine” called Wolfram Alpha and was surprised at the direction the technology was taking. Wolfram Alpha answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine would. To differentiate form a “search engine” when I want to find something a search engine would generate a list of items it thinks is the most relevant to the word or phrase I supplied it with. This works great if I already know what I’m looking for, such as a website listing the schedule of the movie I want to watch tonight. However it makes it a little bit more difficult to find an answer to a question which I’m not sure where to get the answer from. I would have to sift through all the websites cited by the search engine in the list until I find what I’m looking for. In contrast Wolfram Alpha computes and provides answers and visualizations from a core knowledge base of curated, structured data. So for example if I want to make a comparison between the companies Microsoft and Apple, Wolfram Alpha not only gives me each company’s market cap, revenue, number of employees and P/E ratio but also provides a graphical representation of their stock prices for the past few months. Of course the answer engine is capable of answering questions in other fields of study as well.

While the technology has just recently been released last May 15, 2009 it was voted the greatest computer innovation of 2009 by Popular Science. Ultimately the question, the people behind this technology, hope to be able to figure out is the workings of the universe itself. It reminds me of a scene in Artificial Intelligence where David, the robot boy, faced the head of a cartoony 3D Dr. Know, asking where he could find the blue fairy. It’s not far-fetched to think that someday we’ll each have our very own 3D cartoony Dr. Know head with all the information in the world and the intelligence to match able to answer any question our mind can conceive such as the exact environmental and economic effect of global warming, the formula for cold fusion, the cure for cancer and yes... the schedule for tonight's movies.

Linus Madamba
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