Wolfram Alpha is an answer engine developed by
Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly
by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of
documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might.
It was announced in March 2009 by Stephen Wolfram, and was released to the
public on May 15, 2009.
Wolfram Alpha is
almost more of an engineering accomplishment than a scientific one — Wolfram
has broken down the set of factual questions we might ask, and the
computational models and data necessary for answering them, into basic building
blocks — a kind of basic language for knowledge computing if you will. Then,
with these building blocks in hand his system is able to compute with them — to
break down questions into the basic building blocks and computations necessary
to answer them, and then to actually build up computations and compute the
answers on the fly.
Users submit queries
and computation requests via a text field. Wolfram Alpha then computes and
infers answers and relevant visualizations from a core knowledge base of
curated, structured data. Alpha thus differs from semantic search engines,
which index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to
one Wolfram Alpha is built on Wolfram's
earlier flagship product, Mathematica,
which encompasses computer
algebra, symbolic and numerical
computation, visualization, and
statistics capabilities. With Mathematica running in the background, it is
suited to answer mathematical questions. The answer usually presents a human-
readable solution.
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