Wolfram Alpha Launches Tonight, On Camera 218
future.nerd tips news that Wolfram Alpha is set to be launched tonight at 8PM EST (00:00 GMT), and the entire process will be broadcast live, via webcast. Steven Wolfram said to PCPro, "We've been rather surprised that we haven't been able to find even a single publicly available record of the commissioning of any large website at all. So we thought we would document our own experience. We can't guarantee that everything will go smoothly. We fully expect to encounter unanticipated situations along the way. We hope that it'll be interesting for people to join us as we work through these in real time." In a related blog post, he explains how Wolfram Alpha interacts with Mathematica.
It is receiving universal praise... (Score:3, Interesting)
...from all the commenters on Wolfram's blog [wolframalpha.com]. It is actually rather amusing to read through the long list of overwhelmingly positive comments.
I was right (Score:4, Interesting)
First Thing I'll do with it (Score:3, Interesting)
Pit it against 20Q [20q.net]. Come up with a random thing, and have 20Q ask questions while WA gives answers, and see if the two together can figure out what I was thinking of. My guess is that the questions will be too bizarre for WA to handle ("is electricity an animal, vegetable, or mineral?"), but it should be interesting.
Re:Launch delayed, WolframAlpha hits a "snag" (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree and from what I've seen of WolframAlpha so far, is it seems like an excellent "thinking sketch pad". You can brainstorm ideas quickly with it, performing quick calculations in seconds what might take you 5 or 10 minutes to search for, gather input, convert units, get the right equation, and then finally perform the calculation. With this thing you can just type in your question in a loose form and play with the idea. Again, it's only a "sketch" pad so to speak. So if your idea or direction you are going looks good, you can roll up your sleeves and do the "real stuff" on your own system.
And that's what I find very interesting: WolframAlpha gets to watch the calculations be performed by bright (and not so bright) people all over the world and see what ideas people are tinkering with. They could flag certain equations on the cutting edge and so on...
And it's only going to get better.
Re:Google Killer (Score:3, Interesting)
Or maybe they simply don't want to be compared to Google and their goal was simply not to create a Google killer.
From the few test queries I just did it looks to me like a app that one can use next to google. Instead of just blindly go to google to search for something you now can make a choice.
What kind of information am I looking for? Which engine do I expect to handle my question the best?
As far as I can tell now it's a cross-over between wikipedia and google at best.