Wolfram Alpha (also styled WolframAlpha and 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 might.^[3]

Wolfram Alpha is based on the computational platform Mathematica, written by British scientist Stephen Wolfram in 1988.^[4] Wolfram Alpha was announced in March 2009 and subsequently released on 15 May 2009.^[1]

Overview[link]

Users submit queries and computation requests via a text field. Wolfram|Alpha then computes answers and relevant visualizations from a knowledge base of curated, structured data. Alpha thus differs from semantic search engines, which index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to one.

Wolfram|Alpha is built on Wolfram's earlier flagship product, Mathematica, which encompasses computer algebra, symbolic and numerical computation, visualization, and statistics capabilities. The answer usually presents a human-readable solution. Wolfram has said of the engine:

"All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do,"^[4]

Wolfram|Alpha is capable of responding to particularly phrased natural-language fact-based questions such as "Where was Mary Robinson born?" or more complex questions such as "How old was Queen Elizabeth II in 1974?" It displays its "Input interpretation" of such a question, using standardized phrases, e.g. "Mary Robinson | place of birth" or "age | of Queen Elizabeth II (royalty) | in 1974". (The answer for Robinson includes "Ballina, Mayo, Ireland", a variety of contextual information regarding Ballina, County Mayo, and a link to an on-line biography of Robinson. The answer for Elizabeth is "Age at start of 1974: 47 years", and a biography link.)

It is also capable of performing calculations on data using more than one source:

• Example: "What is the fifty-second smallest country by GDP per capita?" yields Nicaragua, $1160 per year.

Wolfram|Alpha makes inferences from a smaller set of core information. In this way it has many parallels with Cyc, a project aimed at developing a common-sense inference engine.

Wolfram Alpha doesn't answer queries which require a narrative response as "What is the difference between the Julian and the Gregorian calendars?" but will answer factual or computational questions such as "1 June in Julian calendar".

Licensing partners[link]

Wolfram Alpha is used to power some searches in the Microsoft Bing and DuckDuckGo search engines.^[5][6] It is also queried by Apple's Siri for factual question answering as well as the Dexetra's clone of it for Android Iris.

Technology[link]

Wolfram|Alpha is written in 15 million lines of Mathematica^[7] (using webMathematica and gridMathematica) code and runs on 10,000 CPUs (though the number was upgraded for the launch).^[8][9]

• Example: "lim(x->0) x/sin x" yields the expected result, 1, as well as a possible derivation using L'Hôpital's rule, a plot, and the series expansion.

The database currently includes hundreds of datasets, such as "All Current and Historical Weather". The datasets have been accumulated over approximately two years, and will continue to grow. The range of questions that can be answered will grow with the expansion of the datasets.^[10]

History[link]

Launch preparations began on 15 May 2009 at 7 pm CDT (16 May 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 18 May 2009.^[11]

Wolfram Alpha has received mixed reviews.^[12][13] Wolfram Alpha advocates point to its potential, some even stating that how it determines results is more important than current usefulness.^[12]

On Dec 3, 2009, an iPhone app was introduced. Some users^[14] considered the initial $50 price of the iOS app unnecessarily high since the same features could be freely accessed by using a web browser instead. They also complained about the simultaneous removal of the mobile formatting option for the site.^[15] Wolfram responded by lowering the price to $2, offering a refund to existing customers^[16] and re-instating the mobile site.

Wolfram Alpha Pro[link]

On February 8, 2012, Wolfram|Alpha Pro was released,^[17] offering users additional features for a monthly subscription fee. A key feature is the ability to upload many common file types and data—including raw tabular data, images, audio, XML, and dozens of specialized scientific, medical, and mathematical formats—for automatic analysis. Other features include an extended keyboard, interactivity with CDF, data downloads, and the ability to customize and save graphical and tabular results.^[18]

Along with new premium features, Wolfram Alpha Pro has led to some changes in the free version of the site:

• An increase in advertisements on the free site.
• Text and PDF export options now require the user to set up a free account.
• The option to request extra time for a long calculation used to be free but is now only available to subscribers.^[19]

Criticism[link]

InfoWorld has published an article^[20] warning readers of the potential implications of giving an automated website proprietary rights to the data it generates but Richard Stallman disagrees that such rights are transfered.^[21]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Wolfram Alpha: A New Way To Search?, Stephen Wildstrom, BusinessWeek, 9 March.
• Stephen Wolfram's Answer To Google: If Wolfram/Alpha works as advertised, it will be able to do something Google can't: provide answers that don't already exist in indexed documents. by Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek, 10 March 2009.
• Better Search Doesn’t Mean Beating Google by Saul Hansell, The New York Times, 9 March 2009.
• Wolfram Alpha will Take Your Questions – Any Questions, Ian Paul, PC World, 9 Mar 2009.
• Wolfram Alpha: Searching for Truth: Stephen Wolfram talks with Rudy Rucker about his Upcoming Release by Rudy Rucker, H+ Magazine.
• "A hungry little number cruncher: Wolfram Alpha search tool mines databases to yield math-based replies" by Hiawatha Bray, The Boston Globe, 5 May 2009

External links[link]

• Official website
• Official blog
• Wolfram Alpha is coming, Stephen Wolfram's blog.
• Recorded launch video.

Stephen Wolfram
Born	(1959-08-29) 29 August 1959 (age 52) London, England, UK
Nationality	British
Fields	Mathematics, Physics, Computing
Institutions	Wolfram Research
Alma mater	Oxford University, Caltech
Known for	Creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha Author of A New Kind of Science
Notable awards	MacArthur Fellowship

Stephen Wolfram (born 29 August 1959) is a British scientist^[1] and the chief designer of the Mathematica software application and the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine.

Biography[link]

Stephen Wolfram's parents were Jewish refugees who emigrated from Westphalia, Germany, to England in 1933.^[2][3] Wolfram's father Hugo was a textile manufacturer and novelist (Into a Neutral Country) and his mother Sybil was a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford.^[4] He has a younger brother, Conrad.^[5]

Wolfram was educated at Eton, where he amazed and frustrated teachers by his brilliance and refusal to be taught, instead doing other students' math homework for money.^[4] Wolfram published an article on particle physics^[6] but claimed to be bored and left Eton prematurely in 1976.^[7] He entered St John's College, Oxford at age 17 but found lectures "awful".^[4] Working independently, Wolfram published a widely cited paper on heavy quark production at age 18^[3] and nine other papers^[4] before leaving in 1978 without graduating.^[7] He received a Ph.D. in particle physics from the California Institute of Technology at age 20,^[8] joined the faculty there and received one of the first MacArthur awards in 1981, at age 21.^[7] According to Google Scholar Stephen Wolfram is cited by over 30,000 publications (up to April 2012) and has an h-index of 58. ^[9]

Wolfram's work with Geoffrey Fox on the theory of the strong interaction is still used today in experimental particle physics.^[10] Wolfram is married to a mathematician and has four children.^[11]

Wolfram received a standing ovation^[12] for his 2010 TED Talk, Computing the theory of everything^[13], as well as his 2012 talk at SXSW, where he was named Speaker of the Event^[14].

Work[link]

Symbolic Manipulation Program[link]

Wolfram led the development of the computer algebra system SMP (Symbolic Manipulation Program) in the Caltech physics department during 1979–1981. A dispute with the administration over the intellectual property rights regarding SMP—patents, copyright, and faculty involvement in commercial ventures—eventually caused him to resign from Caltech.^[15] SMP was further developed and marketed commercially by Inference Corp. of Los Angeles during 1983–1988.

Complex systems and cellular automata[link]

In 1983, Wolfram left for the School of Natural Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he studied cellular automata, mainly with computer simulations. He produced a series of papers systematically investigating the class of elementary cellular automata, conceiving the Wolfram code, a naming system for one-dimensional cellular automata, and a classification scheme for the complexity of their behavior. He conjectured that the Rule 110 cellular automaton may be Turing complete. In the middle 1980s Wolfram worked on simulations of physical processes (such as turbulent fluid flow) with cellular automata on the Connection Machine alongside Richard Feynman.^[16] and helped ignite the field of complex systems founding the first institute devoted to this subject, The Center for Complex Systems Research (CCSR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign^[17] and the journal Complex Systems in 1987.^[18]

Mathematica[link]

In 1986 Wolfram left the Institute for Advanced Study for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he founded their Center for Complex Systems Research and started to develop the computer algebra system Mathematica, which was first released in 1988, when he left academia. In 1987 he co-founded a company called Wolfram Research which continues to develop and market the program.^[3]

[edit] A New Kind of Science

From 1992 to 2002, he worked on his controversial book A New Kind of Science, which presents an empirical study of very simple computational systems. Additionally, it argues that for fundamental reasons these types of systems, rather than traditional mathematics, are needed to model and understand complexity in nature. Wolfram's conclusion is that the universe is digital in its nature, and runs on fundamental laws which can be described as simple programs. He predicts a realization of this within the scientific communities will have a major and revolutionary influence on physics, chemistry and biology and the majority of the scientific areas in general, which is the reason for the book's title.

Since the release of the book in 2002, Wolfram has split his time between developing Mathematica and encouraging people to get involved with the subject matter of A New Kind of Science by giving talks, holding conferences, and starting a summer school devoted to the topic.^[19]

Computational knowledge engine[link]

In March 2009, Wolfram announced Wolfram|Alpha, an answer engine with a new approach to knowledge extraction and an easy-to-use interface, launched on May 16, 2009 ^[20][21] and a Pro version launched on February 8, 2012^[22] The engine is based on natural language processing, a large library of algorithms and answers queries using the approach described in A New Kind of Science. The application programming interface (API) allows other applications to extend and enhance Alpha.^[23] Wolfram|Alpha is the answer engine behind Microsoft's Bing^[24] and Apple's Siri (along with Google and Yelp!) answering factual questions.^[25]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Stephen Wolfram

• Official website
• Wolfram Research blog to which Stephen Wolfram contributes
• Stephen Wolfram at TED Conferences
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Stephen Wolfram on Charlie Rose
• Works by or about Stephen Wolfram in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• TWiT - Triangulation 7: Stephen Wolfram (Audio podcast)