Wolfram Alpha - "Making the world's knowledge computable"

[Seamus]

I don't know if this is the right section for this post. I wanted to share a website with the forum, I thought it might be interesting/useful for someone. When I stumbled on it this morning I thought of a recent SOTT post about the possibility of the internet becoming self aware.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Here is a screencast introducing what it is, how to use it.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

A description from the homepage:

Today's Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing

The company behind the tool is Wolfram Research, founded by Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica software.

From the Wolfram Alpha about page:

We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything

The possibility/danger that this website could be used to control knowledge and scientific debate is pretty obvious. I haven't had time to research Stephen Wolfram and his company, but I will follow up when I do.

Seamas

 

[Johnno]

Pretty cool, it didn't know how to handle "objective truth" though.