Computing The Answer To Your Question... (Image Credit: David Asch)

As I noted earlier, the presentation from Theodore Gray was quite an experience given that more than half of the 12 or so people in the room joining me to watch the presentation were serious big hitters at Google (VP’s and higher) that I know personally.  So we’ve got the co-founder of Wolfram Alpha basically revealing some pretty juicy details of his service to a very interesting crowd – quite a setting.

One of the most interesting insights I gathered from Theodore is that Wolfram Alpha is not simply sitting on its laurels letting its service stagnate and languish.  Quite the opposite is true in fact – these guys are modifying and innovating their service at light speed. With hundreds of thousands of users now pounding on the service everyday, Wolfram Alpha is able to learn about bugs and kinks in the system at a blistering pace.  In fact this is one of the primary reasons that the service was launched when it was, even though it wasn’t as polished as Wolfram Alpha might have hoped.  Wolfram Alpha wanted to leverage the power of millions of users to largely automate the detection of the service’s myriad flaws.  Each day the Wolfram Alpha engine is improving as tiny problems are identified either by users directly or by analyzing the logs, and then fixed.  The website’s interface itself, just like Google, remains ever the same with only a deceivingly simple search box, but behind the scenes the service is constantly evolving.

Not only are bugs being worked out, but the amount and quality of data that the Wolfram Alpha engine is able to draw upon is rapidly expanding.  As it stands now, the only data incorporated into the Wolfram Alpha engine is data that has been acquired though trusted, one on one relationships between Wolfram Alpha and the creator/owner of the data.  This includes all sorts of data, from Morningstar financial data to chemistry data from the CRC handbook, and this trove of data is growing rapidly.  The Wolfram Alpha service is becoming more comprehensive and powerful as the amount of data it is able to draw from expands.

Although incorporating data from trusted sources through direct relationships is a valuable first step in Wolfram Alpha’s data acquisition strategy, the people at Wolfram Alpha fully understand that this paradigm has severe limitations.  The true power of the Wolfram Alpha question answering engine will only be unleashed when it is able to draw upon crowdsourced data that can be submitted by anyone all over the world.  A large corpus of more current data, or recently changing information, such as the death of a person, achievement of a new world record, and various other day to day information updates will then be available to the engine.  For Wolfram Alpha, the challenge is to incorporate this data in a way that properly labels it so that users can decide for themselves how much they can trust the data supporting the answers to their questions.

Even though the Wolfram Alpha engine has a long way to go towards question answering nirvana, the service is already impressively capable and it deserves respect from the public at large as a new and valuable tool in our information gathering arsenals.  Wolfram Alpha is not Google.  It is not a search engine that helps you find information on the web.  Wolfram Alpha is a computational question answering engine – it can compute factual answers from simple human readable questions.  It is a true paradigm shift, a revolutionary service that can convert a regular human being into a super human with stunning computational capabilities at the tip of their fingers.

Theodore noted that there are several calculations that are common to professions that although straightforward, still require large amounts of time and effort for even the skilled professional.  Take the preparation of a molar solution in chemistry, a daily task for practicing chemists and students in high school and college.  These calculations require one to look up various pieces of information in tables and charts and then several mathematical conversions to achieve an answer.  Now with the Wolfram Alpha engine, both trained professionals as well as the common man can make this calculation instantly by inputting only the most basic characteristics of the problem.  Simply type “0.4 molar potassium chloride” into Wolfram Alpha and bam! – out comes the list of properties of the solution and the quantities of solute and solvent required to make it.

Wolfram Alpha opens the possibility of completely changing the rules of education.   Wolfram Alpha can answer the questions to an hour’s worth of hard chemistry homework in a matter of minutes.  Just as the calculator has revolutionized the capabilities and the learning expectations of students in mathematics, might Wolfram Alpha do the same for chemistry, physics, engineering, and other fields?

Impressive as the Wolfram Alpha service may be, one has to ask the question “is anybody using it?”.  The answer thus far is a pretty resounding no.  If I look at my own usage of the service, I have to admit that yesterday was the first time I have used it in many weeks, and that was to perform research for this story.  Now that the initial euphoria and interest has worn off since its launch 2 months ago it seems like nobody is talking about Wolfram Alpha.  A look at Wolfram Alpha’s traffic stats from Compete is telling:

From the graph above we can see that during the month of May Wolfram Alpha only saw a paltry 1.5 Million visits to its site in May, followed by a precipitous drop to 750,000 visits during June.  The data from compete is extremely unreliable and can easily be off by a factor of two or more in my experience, but still I think the trend is clear.  Traffic has declined since the initial launch, and even if the Compete data is off by a factor or so, we have to admit that Wolfram Alpha’s traffic is likely on the order of just a few million visitors per month or less rather than the tens of millions that might be expected.

So what does it mean for Wolfram Alpha when even a self proclaimed fan of their service like me is not using it?  I think the point is twofold.  First, it may turn out that many of the factual answers that Wolfram Alpha is good at providing are not answers that we need as often as we thought.  If I was in school right now or in an engineering job I might find myself using Wolfram Alpha a lot more, but for everyday use perhaps not so much.  Second, human behavior is hard to change.  It will take time and perhaps more than a website to get me to use the Wolfram Alpha service as more of a daily part of my routine.

But don’t let Wolfram Alpha’s limited penetration into our lives fool you into discounting the promise and the usefulness of their service.  Whether it be Wolfram Alpha or one of their competitors that brings it to us, the convergence of several technological trends means that the time has come for a reliable, automated question answering service to become a reality.  Wolfram Alpha offers a fantastic technology and it is going to get much better.  It will take time for the company to find more effective ways of injecting its service into our lives through open api’s and integration with other tools (even with Google perhaps), but still the service is a great one and I think it has a bright future.

In its latest show of innovation, we now learn that Wolfram Alpha will turn its launch into a “community” event.  People the world over can watch the Wolfram Alpha team on a live webcast as they try to pull off their ambitious launch.  Although the site is officially slated to launch on May 18, starting later today anyone interested can watch the Wolfram Alpha team as they build up for the official launch on a public channel on Justin.tv.

This very public, community style launch is one of the first of its kind, and it is brilliant.  Wolfram Alpha’s “community” launch humanizes the company by allowing us to take a peek inside and watch the engineers as they attempt to pull off their task.  Now any failures or glitches that occur during the launch will be seen as stumbles that we can all identify with, rather than as mishaps to be ridiculed.  The huge pressure that has been building up for a flawless first day launch is thus conveniently deflated.  We are now converted into fans of the Wolfram Alpha launch team, rooting for them and even conversing with them as they work.

Even as Wolfram Alpha seeks to shake up the information industry with its new question answering engine, it is clear that the company is also charting new territory in the way that a fledgling company can present itself to the world.  Just last week we wrote about Wolfram Alpha’s highly innovative and unorthodox “all at once” launch strategy.  Now they are innovating with a webcast of the launch.  It seems every time I feel myself getting sick of the company, Wolfram Alpha comes out with another cool innovation that draws me back in to root for them.  This is definitely a company to watch.

One of the most interesting things about the Wolfram Alpha launch is its hugely publicized nature.  Most internet services launch quietly in an alpha or beta stage and then slowly improve features and access to the public as the kinks are worked out.  Wolfram Alpha has forgone this proven technique, instead going for a much publicized “all at once” launch, creating an enviable level of interest, but also enormous expectations that may be impossible to meet.

The much publicized launch also creates a serious (and expensive!) engineering challenge for the Wolfram Alpha operations team responsible for building the infrastructure for the service.  On May 18 Wolfram Alpha is going to receive an enormous influx of traffic as everyone and their dog attempts to give the service a go.  Traffic on launch day will easily be an order of magnitude greater than what the service will normally see in its immediate lifetime afterward.  This will require an expensive order of magnitude increase in the number of computers and networking gear needed to support the first day launch, significantly increasing the day one complexity and failure probability of the service.

My bet is that the service will be extremely unreliable on the first day of launch as the site literally crumbles under the massive load.  Going in Wolfram Alpha’s favor is that most users will probably be pretty forgiving of any first day hiccups as long as the service can ultimately deliver the goods.

Years ago I used to manage the global buildout of Google’s thousands of servers, so you’ll pardon me if I am a little over excited to see computers, switches, and ethernet cables being strung together in the Wolfram Alpha datacenter video below.  Huge face time for Dell in the video…if Wolfram Alpha is smart they should have snagged one heck of a deal from Dell for this: