The Answer To All Your Questions: Wolfram Alpha
Posted: Tuesday, June 09, 2009
by Asher Ricard
There is an excitement building as news of a new search formula is released. A search that would revolutionize how individuals find answers to every day questions.
As it is now, when individuals type in a question, they have to sit with their fingers crossed that someone somewhere in the Internet universe has already done the needed research and posted the answer some place online.
The implications of this software are endless. As someone who loves research and learning new things, I anxiously await its release. It basically takes nine-tenths of what is on the shelf at the local library along with Wikipedia and the U.S. Census and combines the knowledge to answer any question known to man.
According to Wired, you can even put in a random string of letters such as "ACTCGTC" and the program will recognize it as genetic code and tell you what strand of DNA that gene lives and what is known about it.
Can you imagine? All those papers in college could take half the time with one search of this program. Not to mention the ease to cheat at useless trivia questions around offices across the nation.
It could tell us how many presidents were born in November. How many Nobel Prizes Americans have won? The possibilities are endless.
I love the fact that we have gotten so advance as a society that individuals and groups can create programs that answer all of life's questions.
This is a much needed product because as it is now, you have to hope someone has done the research before you and posted. Answers are usually found, currently, on sites such as YahooAnswers, Asked.com, Unasked.com, etc.
The honest truth of these sites is that the answers come from the community in most cases meaning that some junior high or high school kid could have been the one to answer it as opposed to a Ph.D. Or expert in the field. This program changes those issues.
Wolfram has yet to release the program as he is still unsure how he will do it. He states he may give it away. He may also sell it to Google. He may licensed it and sell it as an application on mobile devices, in offices, etc.
After all, it isn't the money that is so deserved from an invention of this magnitude. To the creator, I think it is just the process of creating something that will impact and change the world of search.
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