Software engineer promises Google-killer.

The Netzvordenker around the globe are in turmoil: The brilliant scientist Stephen Wolfram will replace, to break Google's omnipotence. He has a previously top secret software programmed - it can allegedly Want answers to specific questions.

 

This much is clear: Were it not about Stephen Wolfram, the fuss would be made since the weekend parts of the Internet, has changed less in size. A Google-killer wanted to build a lot - but he believed it to be.

Wolfram Alpha Home: "A new Paradigman for the use of computers and the Web"?

Wolfram was early as a child prodigy. He visited the British elite training facilities Eton and Oxford, at the California Institute of Technology, he made a doctorate in theoretical physics - he was 20 years old. There, he developed a forerunner of the software, which it later famous and probably quite well off, should - "Mathematica", up to now a standard tool for scientists and mathematicians, a kind of universal computer tool kit of mathematical models. Now send in tungsten, with a new, more complex piece of software is equal to an even greater revolution trigger.

"Cellular automata and Mathematica = Deep Thought?

"A new paradigm for the use of computers and the Web," says Wolfram even his project
in a blog entry. That sounds so full that one is suspicious - after all, many in the attempt failed, a more powerful universal answer machine as Google to build.

Fifty years ago, in the early days of computers that had been expected that machines will soon deal with all the might Wolfram writes: "The fact that the computer is only a matter would have to make, and it can calculate the answer. But this did not happen. " Well, believe it, either one at a point at which this promise was finally einzulösen. The combination of Mathematica and its theories of basal, basic programs, which he called "cellular automata" is called. With a book on this topic
"A New Kind of Science" (read online) made of tungsten Furore 2002, far beyond the world of mathematics and natural sciences also.

"Wolfram Alpha" is now called the tool, the website where you will be able to use it, is already online - but without function. In May will be the change, and one can assume that in the Googleplex in Mountain View with great interest test is whether the job actually works. Because tungsten Alpha is much of what Google does - only better.

Questions that, in natural language. With the answers, not lists of possible locations are, where you could find the answer, but simply the most sought-fact. A "computational knowledge engine" that Wolfram calls a "calculating machine knowledge" to some extent. Developed in the course of years, with a team of approximately 100 employees allegedly. The developer even considers the whole thing quite as Work in Progress: Just like Mathematica Wolfram Alpha will also probably never completely finished.

"Wolfram Alpha calculates the answers"

A search engine in the conventional sense is unlikely Wolfram Alpha. The Web Entrepreneur Nova Spivack has been the prototype may view, describes the tool first time by process of elimination: "It raises not just documents that may contain the answer, such as Google, and it is not just a huge knowledge base like Wikipedia. It understands not only natural language, and uses this ability to find documents, such as Powerset. "

No, writes
Spivack in a long, almost reverent blog entry, "Wolfram Alpha calculates the answers to a wide range of issues." Spivack has founded numerous companies - and he is expert on the semantic Web, one of the existing approaches to the unresolved questions in a smarter network exactly knows. His company, "Twins" will also be a smarter network, albeit with a completely different approach, a social.

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Calculate but Wolfram is alpha the crucial keyword. There is the meager information available indicates that so far, in three parts: one giant database, a huge collection of algorithms and a translator of linguistically formulated questions makes computing tasks that the algorithms have access to the database can be solved. This database is factual information about the world on scientific models and relationships, about cooking and music, geography and technology and many other zones.

None Webcrawler together with the required information but, as Wolfram writes, "curated" data, and "trillions" of it. Curated means Wolframs team has selected the records, their sources as reliable. Be it stocks, geographical coordinates or information about the human genome.

"Extremely impressive and thorough answers"

"Wolfram is alpha, as if you are in a huge electronic brain einstöpselt," said Nova Spivack after his first trial. It will deliver "extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range of issues in many different ways asked." And this answer would also be calculated, "not simply in a large database for beaten." The connection to the Web would come only in a further step - in addition to the responses of the system could be presented to links, such as the corresponding Wikipedia entry or technical publications on the topic.

The responses were, however, extremely detailed graphics and enriched with partially so thorough, so comprehensive, "that you would need a university degree in order to fully understand," restricts Spivack A. "It was designed by and for people with intelligence quotients in the region of tungsten constructed - it will take some work put into it have to be a few hundred stupid points to make to the average consumer not to overwhelm."

The creator of thinking, the nature differently. The system will be finished tungsten his blog entry, "us almost to the point to which people have thought 50 years ago that computers would reach him."

In May, you can guess whether he is right.