The last question

Wolfram Alpha homepage

Wolfram Research has released a few weeks ago what could be the first instance of a computational knowledge engine, Wolfram Alpha. By a computational knowledge engine I mean a computing system in which we provide questions in natural language and receive meaningful and correct answers derived from internal knowledge and immense data-banks.

According to the project’s about page

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. 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. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

As you can see, this is a work in progress. The system still has shortcomings, but it can already interpret and answer correctly many questions from a very diverse range of topics, that are not only limited to exact sciences.

Here are some examples of funny or insightful questions that amused me for a while…

• What is Wolfram Alpha?, What is your name? or Who are you?
• Where are you? and Where am I?
• What is my name? and My name is Ernesto
• What’s the second largest country in the world?
• Milk and apple juice or Milk vs apple juice

And before I finish, just as a curiosity, I asked Wolfram Alpha the last question a few minutes ago…

How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?

Unfortunately, there’s still insufficient data for a meaningful answer. The people behind this project have still a lot of work to do.

Kudos for all your great work and for this fine product!