SPS Forum

If you think Mathematica is an awesome tool, wait till you see Wolfram's latest project: Wolfram Alpha.

Right now it's still in development, but if it works, then it's actually a "search engine" that answers factual queries directly. Ideally, I suppose if you type "Why is the sky blue?", it will return you "Rayleigh scattering" and an explanation of the phenomena. It's kinda like asking someone else who is equipped with Google or Wikipedia.

It's gonna be interesting to see if he can pull this one off or not. Because language structure is immensely complex and varied, I wonder how successfully he can program the code to answer the question in a correct and relevant manner. I mean, consider this set of similar questions:

1) How many planets are there in the solar system?
2) Are the eight planets in the solar system?
3) Are there not eight planets in the solar system?
4) Does the solar system have eight planets?
5) Planets. How many does the solar system have?

Will it decipher all? And how is he gonna program it such that the code can understand as many variants of questions as possible?

Sounds like a project that you might find in SoC or the language department. I'm think they are doing lots of collaborating to get the job done.