In my spare time I have found myself playing around with Wolfram Alpha a lot, it’s an addictive toy in that it is probably the only computational knowledge engine or database of it’s kind on the web right now. The guy behind the project Stephen Wolfram is the CEO of Wolfram Research and has participated in a wide variety of projects in the past including Mathematica.
One thing that I have found playing around with Wolfram is that it’s an extremely intelligent application. Here’s an example based on an instance where I used the application this morning. I was curious as to what the population was for Jacksonville, Arkansas. I went to Wolfram and typed in Jacksonville (without the Arkansas) and within seconds the application returned to me key facts about Jacksonville, Arkansas. I just knew in the back of my mind that it was going to return Jacksonville, Florida because of it being a larger city, but it didn’t. I got to thinking to myself how it knew what I was thinking when I didn’t express my search query more specifically. Obviously it used my IP Address to determine that I was in Arkansas and it pulled up Jacksonville, Arkansas instead. How cool is that? I really, really like this.
If you haven’t checked out Wolfram Alpha yet, I recommend it. It’s probably one of the most impressive things I have seen in a while. I found a video that was posted a few weeks back where Stephen Wolfram was talking about the Wolfram Alpha project to a group at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. I am impressed with this guy and the work that he is doing…
Stephen Wolfram’s Sneak Preview of Wolfram|Alpha on Vimeo
The video is really good and it shares a lot of information.