Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha

URL	wolframalpha.com
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Answer engine
Registration	Optional
Owner	Wolfram Alpha LLC
Created by	Wolfram Research
Launched	May 18, 2009[1] (official launch) May 15, 2009[2] (public launch)
Alexa rank	3,502 (February 2011)[3]
Current status	Active

Wolfram Alpha (styled Wolfram|Alpha) is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine would.^[4] It was announced in March 2009 by Stephen Wolfram, and was released to the public on May 15, 2009.^[1] It was voted the greatest computer innovation of 2009 by Popular Science.^[5][6]

Design

Samuel Davis created a design that lets users submit queries and computation requests via a text field. Wolfram Alpha then computes and provides answers and relevant visualizations from a core knowledge base of curated, structured data. Wolfram Alpha thus differs from semantic search engines, which index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to one. In this way it has many parallels with Cyc, a project aimed since the 1980s at developing a common-sense inference engine.

Wolfram Alpha is built on Wolfram's earlier flagship product, Mathematica, a complete functional programming package which encompasses computer algebra, symbolic and numerical computation, visualization, and statistics abilities. With Mathematica running in the background, it is suited to answer mathematical questions. The answer usually presents a human-readable solution. Alpha also incorporates elements of webMathematica^[7] in delivering its content.

Abilities

The following are examples of queries using Wolfram Alpha. They are accompanied by links to the results of each search to illustrate the variety of answers that Wolfram Alpha provides to non-specific queries.

• mortgage 6%, 25 year, $140000^[8] displays, among other things, repayment rates and graphs that represent capital vs. interest over time.
• life expectancy france 25 year old male^[9] which gives a survival analysis for a person of the given demographic.
• boiling point of water at 6 atm^[10] which returns a phase diagram alongside the result of 432.6 Kelvins.
• lim(x->0) x/sin x^[11] yields the expected result, 1, a plot, and the series expansion. The button "show steps" provides a possible derivation of the result using L'Hôpital's rule.^[12]

Wolfram Alpha can also respond to increasingly complex, natural-language fact-based questions such as:

• "Where was Mary Robinson born?"^[13]
• "How old was Queen Elizabeth II in 1974?"^[14]
• "What is the forty-eighth smallest country by GDP per capita?" yields Sao Tome and Principe, $1110 per year.^[15]

Also, one can input the name of a website, and it will return relevant information about the site, including its hosting location, site rank, number of visitors and more.

The database currently includes hundreds of datasets, including current and historical weather, drug data, star charts, currency conversion, and many others. The datasets have been accumulated over approximately two years, and are expected to continue to grow. The range of questions that can be answered is also expected to grow with the expansion of the datasets.^[16]

Technology

Wolfram Alpha first version was written in about five million lines of Mathematica (using webMathematica and gridMathematica) code and runs on 10,000 CPUs (though the number was upgraded for the launch).^[17][18]

As well as being a web site, Wolfram Alpha provides an API^[19] (for a fee)^[20] that delivers computational answers to other applications. Examples are the Microsoft's Bing^[21] and DuckDuckGo's^[22] search engines.

System requirements

Wolfram Alpha requires an up-to-date web browser.^[23] On older browsers, it does not display text correctly and renders a message that states Sorry... Wolfram|Alpha requires a more up-to-date web browser... on its home page.^[24]

On 19 October 2009, an iPhone application was released to provide an optimized interface for mobile access, priced at $49.99.^[25] In March 2010, the price was cut to $1.99 and made an iPad/iPhone universal application;^[26] users who bought at the higher price were refunded the balance. A version of the app for Android is also available on the Android Market for $1.99. The Wolfram Alpha website is also supported by the Opera Mini mobile browser.

Launch

Launch preparations began on May 15, 2009 at 7 PM CDT (May 16, 2009 0:00 UTC) and were broadcast live on Justin.tv. The plan was to publicly launch the service a few hours later, with expected issues due to extreme load. The service was officially launched on May 18, 2009.^[27]

Wolfram Alpha has received positive reviews.^[28] Wolfram Alpha advocates point to its potential, some even stating that how it determines results is more important than current usefulness.^[28] It has also been used effectively as a teaching tool.^[29]

Easter Eggs

Wolfram Alpha's creators have put a number of easter eggs into the engine, including:

• Query: Why? Answer: Because.
• Query: How do I shot web? Answer: I dunno lol.
• Query: Who is Luke's father? Answer: Darth Vader
• Query: Could a swallow carry a coconut? Answer: It's not a question of where he grips it! It's a simple question of weight ratios! A five-ounce bird could not carry a one-pound coconut. (Monty Python Reference)^[30]
• Query: What is the meaning of life? Answer: 42 (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference)
• Query: Are you Skynet? Answer: No, Skynet became self-aware on August 29, 1997 at 02:14 a.m. US Eastern daylight time. I, on the other hand, was not switched on until May 15, 2009. Furthermore, unlike Skynet, I enjoy interacting with humans in ways that do not involve the launching of nuclear missiles. (In the 1991 science fiction film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Skynet became self-aware and initiated a nuclear attack against Russia on the above date to provoke a counterattack and nuclear holocaust.)

References

External links

• Official website (Mobile)
• Recorded launch video.
• Wolfram Alpha Widgets