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May 12, 2009, 04:26 PM ET
Physicist Set to Unveil 'WolframAlpha' Web Site, a New Kind of Research Helper
What if you could ask your encyclopedia to not only spit out facts, but to perform an analysis with those facts or compute the answers to a math problem for you? A free Web site set to go live this month promises to do just that, potentially becoming a virtual research assistant for professors — or a new way for students to cheat on their homework.
The new site, called WolframAlpha, seems bound to be a useful — and possibly controversial — tool on college campuses. The service will present users with a simple search box, as Google does. But WolframAlpha won’t just point to Web sites about what the user types; it will attempt to compute an answer based on its vast collection of facts and statistical-analysis software.
The hype for the service has been building all week, after a New York Times article called it “one of the most anticipated Web products of the year.”
The site is the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, a scientist and entrepreneur who is best known for creating Mathematica, number-crunching software popular with engineers and mathematicians.
The product is so new and different that the best way to get a sense of it is to watch a demonstration. Thankfully, Mr. Wolfram presented a sneak peek to researchers at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society late last month. A video of the talk is available online.
Professors at the event asked tough questions about the service. There are plenty of scientific issues that are unsettled, one attendee said, so how will the Web site deal with those? Mr. Wolfram said that the site would return footnotes on how it reached its solutions or might even offer users choices of which assumptions they want to use to get an answer.
Another asked who is the audience for the service — students working on homework or serious scientists? “The goal is to make expert-level knowledge accessible to anyone anywhere, anytime,” Mr. Wolfram said. —Jeffrey R. Young
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