SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Quizzing the World's First Answer Engine
from New Scientist
An ambitious attempt to create a "knowledge engine" will go live next week. Called Wolfram Alpha, it is designed to understand search requests made in everyday language and work out the answer to factual questions on almost any aspect of human knowledge.
A preview of Alpha carried out by New Scientist has revealed some of the new technology's abilities but also exposed some shortcomings. Meanwhile, in an apparent attempt to steal Alpha's thunder, Google has released a data visualisation tool that may provide stiff competition when fully developed.
Alpha was created by Stephen Wolfram, famous for the software package Mathematica. He employed more than 150 people to collect information on all the major branches of science, from the properties of the elements and the location of planets to the relationships between species and the sequence of the human genome. Economic measures, such as inflation histories for specific countries, are included, as are geographic, cultural and many other data sets.
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