Wolfram, a Search Engine, Finds Answers Within Itself
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Stephen Wolfram, a 52-year-old scientist, software designer and entrepreneur, tends to go his own way -- often with noteworthy results. He published his first physics paper at 15, earned his Ph.D. from Caltech at 20 and two years later won a MacArthur prize.
Less than three years ago, Dr. Wolfram created a new kind of search engine, called Wolfram Alpha. Unlike Google or Microsoft's Bing, Wolfram Alpha does not forage the Web. It culls its own painstakingly curated database to find answers.
There was skepticism in 2009, when Wolfram Alpha arrived, with critics saying the approach was very limited, useful mainly for math and science facts. But the technology has come a long way, including delivering many answers for Siri, the question-answering personal assistant in the Apple iPhone 4S.
The new version of Wolfram Alpha arrives Wednesday afternoon. Its formal name is Wolfram Alpha Pro, and Dr. Wolfram calls "Step 2, the next step of what can be done with this approach," which he describes as a "computational knowledge engine."
The new version handles data and images. In a recent demonstration, Dr. Wolfram, using his computer mouse, dragged in a table of the gross domestic product figures for France for 1961 to 2010, and Wolfram Alpha produced on the Web page a color-coded bar chart, which could be downloaded in different document formats. He put in a table of campaign contributions to politicians over several years, and Wolfram Alpha generated a chart and brief summary, saying that House members received less on average than senators.
Dr. Wolfram dragged in a 3-D image and after a few seconds it rendered the image -- a guitar -- and reported the number of polygons (2,253), among other characteristics.
The Wolfram data-deciphering engine, however, was flummoxed by a table of occupational income figures plucked from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Web site. Dr. Wolfram suggested that it was confused by all the periods used to separate columns of numbers in the table.
First Published February 7, 2012 12:00 am
