Champaign, Illinois, USA. 2009.11.12 - Popular Science, the world's largest science and technology magazine, has released its list of the top 100 innovations for 2009, and named Wolfram|Alpha as the Best of What’s New Grand Award winner in the category of computing.
Wolfram|Alpha is an online computational tool of immense scope and complexity. It was launched in May '09 with a live online videocast from Wolfram Research in Champaign, Illinois.
Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term project to make as much of the world's knowledge as possible computable, and accessible to everyone. Plain English searches on issues in an extensive range of physical subjects can be conducted with immediate and detailed results. The data is derived from global sources and managed by two supercomputers.
The
Popsci website describes the process: "Enter a few words into the Alpha homepage, and .. it runs a series of algorithms .. to interpret what you’re asking, scours more than 10 trillion pieces of data .. compiles a series of answers by culling the information .. and then presents the answers in text, graphs, tables, charts or maps."
Although this may initially be regarded as just another website, Wolfram|Alpha has the capacity to become as pivotal to online search as
Google,
YouTube and
Wikipedia have become. The extraction of vast amounts of information from a plethora of databases, and the computational ability to convert this data into detailed answers to online questions, is ground breaking.
It is a delight to geeks and cinephiles alike, that amongst its prodigious intelligence, Wolfram|Alpha also has a sense of humor. If you enter "Hi", it replies "Hello, human", and if it becomes overloaded with the immense volume of questions, it says "Sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"!
About Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram is a distinguished scientist, inventor, author, and business leader. He is the creator of
Mathematica, the creator of Wolfram|Alpha, and the founder and CEO of
Wolfram Research. His career has been characterized by a sequence of original and significant achievements.
After more than ten years of highly concentrated work, Wolfram described his achievements in his 1200-page book "
A New Kind of Science", released in 2002.
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