Stephen Wolfram Q&A

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Some collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram

Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.

May 29, 2009

From: Interview by Monica Attard, ABC Local

Google is planning to launch a similar service to Wolfram|Alpha called Google Squared. Do you see it as similar?

I don’t really know enough about it. I mean, I think that what we’ve been doing here is a much more insanely ambitious project than I think anybody else really could seriously imagine at this point. I don’t really know about the details, but the general search engine concept tends to be you’re foraging information from the web and kind of using some purely automated algorithm to present that foraged information in some useful way. And that’s great for many purposes, you know; I use search engines all the time.

What we are doing is something that in a sense uses humans a lot more because we’re trying to take the knowledge of the world, as it’s been accumulated by humans, and sort of make use of that knowledge and that expertise to kind of build something that can compute answers to questions.

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