Stephen Wolfram Q&A
Submit a questionSome 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
Is Wolfram|Alpha another Google, a simple search engine? Or is it like a vast encyclopedia of sorts?
When you look up a term in the encyclopedia, you still have to go and read the paragraph about that term and you have to make sort of your own conclusions from the narrative text that’s written there.
The idea of Wolfram|Alpha is you have a specific question, you know: where will the Sun be at, you know, 12:44pm today, or something. You can ask that specific question, Wolfram|Alpha will go and compute for you the specific answer and just tell you the results, it won’t be saying, go read this and now go figure out something for yourself. It’s trying to actually specifically answer a specific question that you would have.