Wolfram Alpha makes its debut on May 18th. I have to confess that after the pomposity with which Stephen Wolfram published his much-uncelebrated book “A New Kind of Science” seven year ago (an anniversary he celebrated rather pompously again today), I was sort of hoping Wolfram Alpha would fail to live up to the hype. But so far it’s looking pretty good. Here’s a screencast showing what Wolfram Alpha can do right now.
While I’m sure the engine isn’t quite as flexible or powerful as the demo makes it seem (presumably Wolfram only asks questions he knows Wolfram Alpha has a good answer to), there’s clearly a lot of functionality already built in. What really blows me away in this demo is the ability to instantaneously plot the relation between arbitrary variables–in Wolfram’s example, the correlation between national GDP and railway length for European countries. Wolfram Alpha is built on Mathematica, so assuming that some of Mathematica’s statistical functions make it in (e.g., linear regression), it’ll make for a pretty awesome toy.
Of course, all this looks like it’ll require a good deal more computing power to serve up than your average Google query, so we’ll see how well Wolfram Alpha’s servers survive the onslaught that’s sure to accompany its arrival next week.
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