Wolfram have built a budding Deep Thought, a computer system that will
(eventually) answer any question. While "Life, the Universe, and
Everything" might be a little ways off, the new Wolfram Alpha is
engineered to answer your inquiries in ways that Google can't.
Right now there is more information available than at any point in history - probably more than all of human history combined - and most of it is absolute garbage. There are Pokemon slashficcers who've polluted the collective consciousness with more words than entire civilizations have left us, because clay pots don't last long and PikaPoker007 has a laptop. Drowning in data is a very real risk, which is why Googling is so popular it's become a verb - any technique to surf and sift the sea of information is vital.
Wolfram Alpha operates on a different model - it will attempt to deliver comprehensive answers instead of dredging for data, and anyone who bills it as an anti-Google just told you they don't understand either. The new tool will collect references, perform the calculations for you (no more cut and pasting to calc.exe or Excel) and offer relevant facts and figures to expand your knowledge of the subject.
You might think that's an impossible task, but that's because you're not a scientist - and that's not an insult, just a case of branding. Wolfram's Mathematica has been the absolute must-have of academic calculations for a decade - these guys aren't just the brain-trust, they're the brain-trust trusted by brain trusts to build their computing tools.
The first version, already live by the time you read this, is called Alpha for a reason. It can't quite handle human speech and requires a special input syntax - but nothing beyond advanced Google use. An internet tool which can actually answer questions, and attempt to educate the user? It could be the perfect complement to Google, allowing us to both find facts and attempt to understand them.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
Wolfram Alpha http://www.wolframalpha.com/index.html
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