Recently a British physicist has announced plans to release a new internet search engine that has been suggested to become a direct web search tool competitor to Google. Stephen Wolfram has said that his company named Wolfram Research will unveil the new scheme in about two months time.
The website goes under the name Wolfram Alpha and the concept of the site is to understand directly what people type into web search and find them an exact answer.
Wolfram writes on his website that he thought in the history of the computer by now people would have been able to ask a computer a factual question and have it calculate an answer. He claims that now his system is in a position to do so.
According to Wolfram the system he has created can understand questions that users ask for and processes the answer on its vast mathematical and scientific engine. This ability to determine things has long been a far off dream for computer scientists, yet Wolfram believes we should communicate with computer in an innate way and that is what his system is able to do.
He then goes on to discuss how human’s communicate with natural language and when dealing with knowledge this is how communication with computers should ideally happen. But he then stresses that this task of getting computers to work with natural language has been extremely difficult to achieve and that there are still huge amounts of text on the web that computers will not understand.
This is all in comparison to other web search engines, such as Google that find their information by contrasting search terms against the billions of documents stored on the servers and pointing the user to a possible correct page. This method so far has been proven to be extremely successful yet computer scientists have still seem interested in creating a system that can directly understand human language.
Wolfram says that his system will be like ‘plugging into a cast electronic brain’ and that the answers it will produce will be both thorough even if they are worded in different ways. He goes on to say that the system will compute the answers and not just look them up on a large database.
So far his reactions to these claims have been mixed especially in his confident assertions about the success it may or may not have. Whatever the result Wolfram’s past record is pretty strong, a previous computer program he designed named Mathmatica is used by scientists to aid them with their work.
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