Brief introduction about Wolfram Alpha

Pau Wing Hong

Wolfram|Alpha (also known as Wolfram Alpha) is more than a search engine like Google. Instead, it is an answer-engine/computational engine developed by Wolfram research. Traditional search engines like Google and yahoo, which are only capable of providing a list of links to information, don’t answer questions. They only take your keywords at face value and don’t always yield good results. What really makes Wolfram Alpha shines is that it can compute, just like a calculator. It computes solutions and responses from a structured knowledge database.

Since the day it starts, the Wolfram Alpha Knowledge Engine contains 50,000 types of algorithms and models and over 10 trillion pieces of data. It is still in development, and is always accumulating new information to its database. As Wolfram|Alpha is running on 10,000 CPUs with Mathematica running in the background, it is capable of answering complicated mathematical questions.

The service is built on four basic pillars: a massive amount of data, a computational engine built on top of Mathematica, a system for understanding queries and technology to display results in interesting ways. Wolfram Alpha is also able to answer fact based questions such as “When did Steve Jobs die?” It displays its response as date, time difference from today and Anniversaries for October 5, 2011.

There are a number of things that Wolfram Alpha vastly different from Google. First of all, it is capable of answering complex queries. If complex search queries are typed into Google, it will get confused. This is because it can’t compute, unlike Wolfram Alpha. Just like a calculator, it does not care at all how many arguments are given to it. That’s why concatenating many arguments in a query often works extremely well. Apart from it, the answers and calculation from Wolfram Alpha is very accurate and precise. There is no need to worry about the validity of the information. Thirdly, two sets of data can be compared with graphs easily using Wolfram Alpha in which Google cannot.

Nevertheless, Wolfram Alpha does have its limitations. Since its answers are based on its own software and knowledge database. Wolfram Alpha can only answer a fact based question that has a specific answer. So it is not able to answer open ended questions like “Is Wolfram Alpha better than Google?”

As written in its main page, Wolfram Alpha’s goal is to bring deep, broad, expert-level knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Clearly, the “Google Killer” is quite ambitious. However, in my opinion, Wolfram Alpha is not a typical search engine in essence. Therefore it is not a Google Killer as people might say, but it can be considered as a giant calculating encyclopaedia of statistics and facts. I think the site poses more of a threat to sites like Wikipedia.

The Wolfram Alpha search engine

A new search engine called Wolfram Alpha is launched officially on May 15, 2009. In fact, it is a computation knowledge engine rather than a search engine. Instead of giving users some websites which may contain the information they look for, Wolfram Alpha can compute answers and relevant visualizations to factual queries from its knowledge base of structured data. The designer of Wolfram Alpha, Stephen Wolfram, believes that it will change the way people use online data.
   
This short survey will focus on the principle of Alpha’s question answering feature and how it will affect other weds.

With the help of sophisticated Natural Language Processing algorithms, Alpha can understand the meaning of input fed by a user and try to provide answers from its vast repository of data relevant to the likely cultural stance of the user. For example, even two users enter the same word "Cambridge", the one with a UK-based IP address  will receive the data about the Fenland City while the one with a US-based address will receive the data about the Massachusetts Town.

The performance of Wolfram Alpha greatly depends on the scale of its curation system. It stores huge amount of information and algorithms. Mathematica, a powerful tool for scientific computation, is used to manage such a large-scale data curation system and help Wolfram Alpha compute answers.

Mathematica does not only include algorithms for mathematical computation, but also the whole spectrum of logical, numerical, graphical, symbolic, and other computation. Meanwhile, the fundamentally symbolic nature of the Mathematica language allows an unprecedented degree of interoperability between different parts of the system, and between different algorithms and data sources. For example, if you search for "China GDP", Wolfram Alpha will generate a graph and other relevant economical data to you.

Inside Mathematica, a technology called Automatic algorithm selection enables Mathematica to select and apply the best algorithm(s) for a given task. So Wolfram Alpha can generate answers with high order of accuracy. For example, "lim(x->0) x/sin x" yields the expected result, 1, as well as a possible derivation using L'Hôpital's rule.

In terms of technology, Wolfram Alpha is entirely developed and deployed with Mathematica and Mathematica technologies. It is built on top of 5 million lies of Mathematica code which currently run on top of about 10,000 CPUs. In order to serve the public, a software called gridMathematica which increases the number of parallel processes that Mathematica can run at once is introduced. By increasing the number of tasks available, some types of problems can be solved in less time

Wolfram Alpha is an amazing product combining computational capabilities with linguistic processing capabilities. Due to its direct answering feature, many people compare it with Google search and call it "Google killer". Although Wolfram Alpha is powerful, it may not beat Google. Wolfram Alpha can only turn generic information into specific answers for factual queries. If we use it to search for a song called "sad but true", it will provide us the information about depressed. Furthermore, Google is a company but not a technology. In addition to its quality, the success of Google search also rely on its marketing, sales, customers, developers, brand reputation and luck.

However, Wolfram Alpha will probably be a worthy challenger for Wikipedia and many textbooks and reference works. Since users can get a direct answer to their question together with a nicely presented set of graphs and other information when they look for basic encyclopedic information, people will gradually replace them with computation knowledge engine like Wolfram Alpha.

In conclusion, even though Wolfram Alpha is not a perfectly mature technology, it shows the future trend of search engine. It is foreseeable that future search engines will like AI. Humans can normally communicate with them through natural language and they can respond to us with satisfactory answers directly. 

Reference
1.    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8052798.stm
2.    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Alpha
3.    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/18/wolfram_alpha/
4.    http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wolframalpha_our_first_impressions.php
5.    http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/01/the-secret-behind-the-computational-engine-in-wolframalpha/
6.    http://www.wolfram.com/technology/guide/AutomaticAlgorithmSelection/
7.    http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/how-mathematica-made-wolframalpha-possible.html
8.    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GridMathematica
9.    http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/better-search-doesnt-mean-beating-google/

The Wolfram Alpha Search Engine

Wolfram Alpha is a brand-new search engine. One expert said it "could be as important as Google". What is so special about this new search engine?

Wolfram Alpha is developed by Wolfram Research. Scientists is already using this company’s previous creations, the computer program Mathematica, to help them with their work. Same as this former program, Wolfram Alpha is also mathematic. But this “answer-engine” not just can help you with mathematic works. It can do something more.

The term “answer-engine” means that Wolfram Alpha is “question answering”. The engine would understand your question, then answer your question. For example, typing “which is the tallest building in the world?”, Wolfram Alpha will answer you “Burj Khalifa”. Searching for “lim(x->infinity) (x^3)/(x+5)^3”, Wolfram Alpha will answer you “1”. When compared with Google, or other ordinary search engines, which would gives you websites containing your keywords, Wolfram Alpha’s results would truly amaze us.

Wolfram Alpha is expected to be successful, even can be compared with Google. Before this search engine appeared, it was far more inconvenient to find the answer of our question. Searching on Google gives us a lot if irrelevant results; Reading and searching on books is very time consuming; asking teachers or lecturers is not always possible as we seldom meet. Thus, Wolfram Alpha will be the best choice of search engine when we are looking for answer of a certain question.

Wolfram Alpha also outstands with its sophisticated knowledge. We can easily search for accurate and detailed physics or chemistry data on it. It can also act as a dictionary, giving us several definition of a certain English word. Stephen Wolfram, developer of this engine, also showed us searching examples for nutritional information, weather, and census data in a demonstration. The abundance and flexibility of Wolfram Alpha is astonishing.

Although it has some advantages over Google and other search engines, it is quite different from other search engines. Sometimes what we are looking for are some webpage, some photos, some articles, some wider variety of information, rather than an exact solution. Therefore, there would not be direct competition between these engines.

With its unique and convenient features, it is believed that Wolfram Alpha would become as famous as Google. Its success can even induce other companies to develop new technologies of search engines, not just blinded to the old format webpage search engines.

References

1. http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/15/wolframalpha-is-launching-made-possible-by-mathematica/
2. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wolframalpha_our_first_impressions.php
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Alpha
4. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/wolframalpha-fails-the-cool-test/
5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/09/search-engine-google
6. http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/going-live-and-webcasting-it/