here comes the wolf
You’ve definitely heard about it. You’ve also tried your hand at it. (without really knowing what you were doing or hoping to find) You’re a bit confused about how it might help you. You want to know more. (Or at least I did.)
What might Wolfram’s system do that Google can’t? Say you wanted to know how much cholesterol and saturated fat lurked in a slab of your grandmother’s cornbread. You’d transcribe its ingredients from her yellowed index card to an online query bar, and Alpha would run computations and produce a USDA-style nutrition label. “Sure, you could go to Google, find out calories in a standard egg, and so on—but what a pain in the ass it would be!” exclaimed Wolfram Research cofounder Theodore Gray. “You’d need the data. And you’d need the data to be in forms that can be readily converted, if need be. And you’d need to add them up. You can do it, just as in earlier decades—you could go to the library to find a reference, and today you can go to Google or another search engine to get started. But we make it far easier.” With a conventional search engine, he added, “enter ‘one cup of sugar, one pound of flour,’ and it completely throws up all over your screen.”
This is one example of the sort of thing Alpha was meant to do: provide deeper, more specific, and more graphically dressed-up answers to certain kinds of questions—though a limited set at first. Queries for “D# major” would produce graphics of the musical scale, queries for “Venus” would produce detailed, current maps of the night sky; queries on pairs of companies would produce comparative charts and graphs. It would add extra information: a search for “New York London distance” would produce the answer in miles, kilometers, and nautical miles; a map showing the flight path; and a comparison of how long it would take a jet, a sound wave, and a light beam to make the trip. Ask it about a word (prefaced by the word word), and it would generate etymology tables and synonym networks.
Its all here.
