Wolfram|Alpha: The First Year
May 18, 20109 comments
Years ago I wondered if it would ever be possible to systematically make human knowledge computable. And today, one year after the official launch of Wolfram|Alpha, I think I can say for sure: it is possible.
It takes a stack of technology and ideas that I’ve been assembling for nearly 30 years. And in many ways it’s a profoundly difficult project. But this year has shown that it is possible.
Wolfram|Alpha is of course a very long-term undertaking. But much has been built, the direction is set, and things are moving with accelerating speed.
Over the past year, we’ve roughly doubled the amount that Wolfram|Alpha knows. We’ve doubled the number of domains it handles, and the number of algorithms it can use. And we’ve actually much more than doubled the amount of raw data in it.
Things seem to be scaling better and better. The more we put into Wolfram|Alpha, the easier it becomes to add still more. We’ve honed both our automated and human processes, progressively building on what Wolfram|Alpha already does.
When we launched Wolfram|Alpha a year ago, about 2/3 of all queries generated a response. Now over 90% do.
So, what are some of the things we’ve learned over the past year? Continue Reading…
Posted by Stephen Wolfram
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The Story of the Making of Wolfram|Alpha
May 13, 20103 comments
CNN recently ran the story “Can We Compute an Answer to Every Question?” highlighting Stephen Wolfram’s TED2010 talk. The story also featured an excerpt from Stephen’s “The Story of the Making of Wolfram|Alpha” presentation from the 50 Years of Public Computing at the University of Illinois conference, which was streamed lived here on the blog. As we move closer to Wolfram|Alpha’s first birthday, we thought you might enjoy hear the story of the making of Wolfram|Alpha from its creator, Stephen Wolfram.
In this video, Stephen is joined by Jean Buck, Wolfram|Alpha’s Director of Computable Data, and by Theodore Gray, Co-Founder of Wolfram Research.
Near the end of his talk, Stephen mentions that he’ll be attending the evening reception via an Anybots telepresence robot. Here is a snapshot of Stephen greeting guests at the reception.
Photo by Peter Asaro
A transcript and images from Stephen’s talk are on his website.
Posted by The Wolfram|Alpha Team
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Wolfram|Alpha Goes to College
May 7, 20105 comments
Hello, fellow readers of the Wolfram|Alpha Blog—my name’s Justin. In just a few short weeks, I’ll be graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Over the years I’ve found my own way of getting things done in regards to homework and studying routines. But this semester I realized there were tools available that would make studying and completing assignments easier and help me understand better. One tool that has become increasingly valuable in my routine and those of other students on my campus is Wolfram|Alpha. Recently, I was invited to share how Wolfram|Alpha is being used by students like myself.
Being a marketing major, I had to take some finance and accounting courses, but I was a bit rusty with the required formulas and the overall understanding of the cash flow concepts, such as future cash flows and the net present values of a future investment. A friend recommended I check out Wolfram|Alpha’s finance tools, and they’ve became indispensable in my group’s casework for the semester. Each proposed future investment we were met with, we would go directly to Wolfram|Alpha to compute the cash flows. We even went as far to show screenshots, such as the one below, of inputs and outputs in our final case presentation last week.
I’ve met other students on my campus who have found Wolfram|Alpha to be helpful in their courses. A few months ago while studying in the library, I walked by a table of freshman students all using Wolfram|Alpha on their laptops. I decided to stop and chat with them because I knew one of the girls. They explained how they were using Wolfram|Alpha to model functions and check portions of their math homework. All three girls are enrolled in Calculus III, and not exactly overjoyed about the fact of future— and most likely harder—math classes. Continue Reading…
Posted by Justin Cudmore
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Tinkering with Turing Machines in Wolfram|Alpha
May 6, 20101 comment
If you’re a regular reader of BoingBoing you might have seen this beautiful homemade Turing machine that tinkerer Mike Davey put together (it’s definitely worth watching the video). For those who don’t know, Turing machines are theoretical idealizations of computers. While not intended to be practical, they do allow mathematicians to construct rigorous proofs about what can be computed and what cannot. And now, you can experiment with them directly on Wolfram|Alpha!
To begin with, let’s ask Wolfram|Alpha to simulate the program that Mike Davey used in his video, a binary counter. Using Stephen Wolfram’s notation, this one is 2-state 3-color machine number 1317953. It “counts” in binary, and marks each successive integer when the machine’s head returns to the initial position. We can more easily see how it computes the sequence 1,2,3,4,5… by only showing the steps when it returns to the center column.
Next we can try a Turing machine at random from the infinite “universe” of possible machines. Let’s say we find this particular Turing machine, and want to see how it behaves on different input tapes. We can try a tape filled with random colors, or a finite tape that wraps around, or a tape with an infinite pattern on it, or even a combination of the above. We can also try a random Turing machine that operates with many colors, such as “random 7-color Turing machine”. Continue Reading…
Posted by Taliesin Beynon
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Math and Physics Results We Can Name
May 4, 20108 comments
As we all know by now, Wolfram|Alpha is a computational knowledge engine. That means not only should it be able to do computations on a wide variety of topics, but also that it needs detailed knowledge of the names and salient properties of a wide variety of entities that are commonly encountered in human inquiry and discourse.
This is obvious in the case of classes of objects that fit neatly into curated data collections, such as mathematical surfaces (e.g., Möbius strip), countries of the world (e.g., New Zealand), chemicals (e.g., caffeine), and so forth.
What is perhaps slightly less obvious is just how much knowledge needs to be encoded to have a reasonable “understanding” of almost any named result in math and the sciences. For example, most people (including non-mathematicians) have heard of Fermat’s last theorem and therefore would rightly expect Wolfram|Alpha to be able to say something sensible about it. And as one of my other hats involves writing the online encyclopedia of math known as MathWorld, which is hosted and sponsored by Wolfram Research, putting this information into Wolfram|Alpha naturally fell to me. So, for the past several months, I have been attempting to gradually build up Wolfram|Alpha’s knowledge base on named results in math and physics.
The screenshot below shows what Wolfram|Alpha now returns for Fermat’s last theorem:
As you can see, Wolfram|Alpha begins by giving you the standard name for the result in question, followed by a clearly worded (or at least as clearly worded as could be managed in the marginal space available
) plain English statement of the result. Next, at least in cases where it is possible to do so, a mathematically precise “formal statement” of the result is given. This is followed by any common alternate names the result might have, a listing of historical information, and finally an enumeration of prizes associated with it (where relevant). Continue Reading…
Posted by Eric Weisstein
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Making Real-Time Computations: Satellites
April 29, 20104 comments
Have you ever wondered why you often see this example of the International Space Station (ISS) in promotion pieces for Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram|Alpha App? Aside from the example being visually interesting, the results highlight Wolfram|Alpha’s ability to make complex real-time computations.
Wolfram|Alpha provides some great real-time computations in many, many areas, including satellites. So what is a satellite? There are many definitions, but here we use the term to describe any artificial object in orbit around Earth that has an official North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) number. This means NORAD tracks it and has assigned an official catalog number to it. The code behind Wolfram|Alpha’s dynamic satellite computations is rather complex. Continue Reading…
Posted by Jeff Bryant
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Happy 1st Birthday, Wolfram|Alpha Blog!
April 28, 20109 comments
We can hardly believe it, but one year ago today the Wolfram|Alpha Blog said hello to the blogosphere! Since that day we have published 176 posts covering everything from the launch of Wolfram|Alpha to new data and features developed by members of the Wolfram|Alpha Team, and guest posts by fans of Wolfram|Alpha who are introducing the computational knowledge engine into facets of everyday life.
We’d like to thank the authors and commenters who have made this blog the success that it is today. We’d like to invite you and all of our other 3.9 million unique readers back for another amazing year of coverage from the front lines of Wolfram|Alpha. And if you have not done so already, please subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed. We hope you’ll celebrate with us by taking a look back through the archives. Please use the comments section below to share links to your favorite posts and suggest future topics.
Happy birthday, Wolfram|Alpha Blog!
Posted by The Wolfram|Alpha Team
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Stephen Wolfram’s TED Talk: Computation Is Destined to Be the Defining Idea of Our Future
April 27, 20108 comments
We use this blog as a vehicle to highlight many of our big ideas and discoveries. Today we’re pleased to share with you Stephen Wolfram’s talk from the 2010 TED Conference in Long Beach, California, where he talked about the tools and methods he’s spent the last 30 years developing in his quest to explore computational knowledge.
TED, an organization devoted to bringing together the technology, entertainment, and design industries’ most innovative thinkers to present “Ideas Worth Sharing”, recently shared Stephen’s ideas with the world as a “TED Talk of the Day”. In the signature 18-minute video, Stephen discusses how his lifelong scientific pursuits led to the development of Mathematica, A New Kind of Science, and the computational knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha. He continues, asking new questions and proposing a fourth project—discovering our physical universe through our computational universe.
“Will we find the whole of physics? I don’t know for sure. But I think at this point it’s sort of almost embarrassing not to at least try.” —Stephen Wolfram
Click to view the transcript and slides from Stephen’s talk.
Posted by The Wolfram|Alpha Team
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’Tis the Season for Scrabble
April 23, 20103 comments
There’s no better time than the rainy spring season to bring friends and family together for a game night. If you happen to find yourself at a table full of ruthless Scrabble players, you might find your new best friend in Wolfram|Alpha.
The Scrabble functionality in Wolfram|Alpha has useful tools, such as a points calculator and a dictionary word verifier. Wolfram|Alpha can also suggest other possible words to be used. Currently, Wolfram|Alpha supports the American English, International English, and French versions of Scrabble. Each of these versions has their own scoring system. Wolfram|Alpha’s GeoIP capabilities will return results based on the default version for the user’s location. However, you can specify a version in your input, like “International English Scrabble umbrella”.
Here are a few examples:
You can find the results for words such as umbrella by entering “Scrabble umbrella” into Wolfram|Alpha:
The results pods tells us that the score is 12 and that this word is in the regional Scrabble dictionary (American in this case). It also gives other words that can be made with these letters, listed in score order. Continue Reading…
Posted by The Wolfram|Alpha Team
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Connecting People and Places
April 21, 20107 comments
Here at Wolfram|Alpha, we’re busy curating new data and knowledge from around the world. And as new data rolls in, we’re exploring how it might connect and provide insights to existing datasets. Since the launch of Wolfram|Alpha you’ve been able to explore a number of properties for cities, such as population, geographic properties, location and map coordinates, current local time and weather, economic properties, crime rates, and more. Now, thanks to a recent coupling between people and city data, Wolfram|Alpha can not only tell you that Memphis, Tennessee is the Home of the Blues, but it can also tell you that it’s the birth and/or death place of notable people such as the King of Rock ‘n Roll Elvis Presley and civil rights activist Martin Luther King.
At the present time Wolfram|Alpha contains deaths and births for some 38,000 notable people from around the world in places such as Cape Town, South Africa and Oxford, United Kingdom. Are you wondering where all of the data for notable people in Beijing, China and some other cities is hiding? Given the busy nature of birth and death data, we’re reaching out to Wolfram|Alpha volunteers who are contributing to the project with information from their parts of the world. Did you notice missing data on notable people from your area? You can help add data to Wolfram|Alpha by signing up to become a volunteer. Check out this recent blog post profiling the work of a few dedicated Wolfram|Alpha volunteers.
Posted by The Wolfram|Alpha Team
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