March 12, 2009 by James Oliver
British physicist, Steven Wolfram, is poised to launch an Internet search engine that numerous analysts are very impressed with, so impressed are they, that many are even talking about a new competitor for Google. The engine, currently known as Wolfram Alpha, is an effort to address some of the key deficiencies of the current crop of search engines available. It intends to do this by recognising and understanding people’s questions and answering them specifically.
According to its creators the search engine is able to do this thanks to a hugely complex mathematical and scientific engine. It would have to be complex; the processing of natural language has been a headache for computer scientists ever since there were computers. Along with voice recognition, it’s one of the last great frontiers of programming.
A system that nails it would be phenomenally successful as it would allow a much more intuitive relationship between computers and people, rather than us learning a language to interact with a computer, we would be able to shape them around our modes of communication. It’s been the logical and necessary next step of computing for a long time now; actually managing it would be the definition of a ‘game changing moment’.
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