March 13, 2009 by Matt Thomas
So has he managed it? Well, it’s too early to tell definitively of course but early feedback is good. Nova Spivack, creator of Twine, another natural language system, has weighed in, calling Alpha far better than anything we have seen yet. He even went as far as to state that, “Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain.”
Steven Wolfram certainly has the background to make you think he might be able to do something like this, he studied at Eton, before moving on to Oxford. He then attended the California Institute of Technology, attaining a PHD in theoretical physics at the tender age of 20. Unsurprisingly the Macarthur foundation decided that he was worthy of one of their genius grants.
Later, he courted controversy with the book, ‘A new kind of Science.’ The book attracted criticism from several of his peers for suggesting that the root of science could be found in simple algorithms as opposed to complicated structures and rules. Reaction to this amongst scientists was unsurprisingly less than favourable.
However, if Wolfram Alpha turns out to work as well as he claims, all that controversy will be in the past and he’ll be hailed as an internet pioneer. We’ll watch with interest.
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