Search engine sizes up statistics
Posted on Nov 23, 2009 in News
There has been an explosion of new search engines in the past 10 years for the Wide World Web like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Dogpile, etc. But now there is one just for computation, equation searches, and data. That search is engine is called Wolfram Alpha (WA), named for its founder, Stephen Wolfram, and it has taken the educational and research world by storm. Recently, I had a chance to do a telephone and e-mail interview with Said Hamideh, an Academic Outreach Team Leader from Wolfram.
Q: Why Wolfram Alpha now?
A: Why now? Because a project like this wasn’t really possible until quite recently. But with the expansion of the web, increasingly powerful computers, and 20 years of Mathematica development under our belts, we finally have the tools to start making all human knowledge both
accessible and computable.
Q: What did you guys do to improve the way that W A handles plain math language inputs into Mathematica or whatever languages are involved in computing the query?
A: Wolfram Alpha’s language-parsing abilities are constantly under development. We’re always looking at user logs to see what works… and what doesn’t. We’ve learned a lot about the kinds of “shorthand” and abbreviated ways that people ask questions, so that very simple inputs return the correct responses — and we’ve also improved Wolfram Alpha’s ability to untangle more complex sentence structures. Just like the never-ending project of adding new data, I don’t think we’ll ever really be “finished” with improving Wolfram Alpha’s language-processing algorithms.
Q: Which programming languages are used in Wolfram Alpha?
A: With the exception of the Web code required to display the site in one’s browser, Wolfram Alpha is built almost entirely in Mathematica — as of today, more than 6 million lines of Mathematica code and counting.
Mathematica has highly developed symbolic language at its core, which unifies a broad range of programming paradigms, and uses its unique concept of symbolic programming to add a new level of flexibility to the very concept of programming. It appears to be more robust than C++ or MATLAB and is able to easy enough to understand when parsing through difficult calculations. As of now, Wolfram Alpha contains more 10 trillion pieces of data, more than 50,000 types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for more than 1,000 domains.
Using this new search engine, many calculus, engineering and natural science students can bring up the needed information once an input is entered. You can enter an equation like x^2 sin(x) and the output reveals the exact answer or reasoning behind the answer by plotting, getting its derivative or integral. It also gives you an alternative equation. No other search engine brings up an exact result like Wolfram Alpha.
Try Google for the same equation and the results are as varied as the answer: from a video on what the equation means to a textbook containing said equation. You can see how valuable this search engine is and will be for the 21st century. For more information, please visit www.wolframalpha.com or the code it was built upon at www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/index.html.
Email: gnostic1@uab.edu
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