Is Wolfram Alpha a game changer that will open an exciting new paradigm in our information society or will it be a big flop? In our previous posts we have highlighted our fascination with the paradigm that Wolfram Alpha represents. The highly anticipated computational question answering service is supposed to be able to answer a vast array of natural language questions with a factual answer within a matter of seconds. If the service is as good as people hope, it could be a real game changer. Yet with anticipation so high the expectations are enormous and the service will really have to be good to impress. Although slated for official launch to the public this May, it has just been announced that a sneak preview of the service will be hosted this Tuesday.
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University will host a sneak preview of the Wolfram|Alpha system this Tuesday 4/28 webcast live at 3:00 pm ET. Stephen Wolfram, founder and CEO of Wolfram Alpha and Jonathan Zittrain Professor of Law at Harvard Law School will host a discussion of the underlying technology and implications of Wolfram Alpha after the preview. You can try to participate remotely by sending in your questions via direct message to the @berkmancenter twitter account.
We can’t wait to tune in and post our review shortly after.
Tags: question answering, search, wolfram alpha
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I, for one, can’t wait to test this baby out. But then again, I’m going to ask it the goofiest questions I can, just to see what the answers are. (of course, I’ll test it out with real stuff like my fiancée’s question this morning of how much water to use when she reduced the amount of pancake flour to below the smallest recipe on box).
There is nothing that stops SAGE (which is free) from burying all the “bright” products in the Wolfram stable, it can do more and will overtake even this latest circus act named after an inflated ego.
Wolfram Alpha is a good news in the area of search engines. It has some advantages compared to the other search engines. Still, it is not the competition to Google or other search engines, since it uses totally different approach. It is more like dictionary or encyclopedia than search engine.