mike777 Posted March 9, 2009 Report Share Posted March 9, 2009 A Computational Knowledge Engine for the Web In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a “computational knowledge engine” for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you. It doesn’t simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn’t just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn’t simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example. Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions — like questions that have factual answers such as “What country is Timbuktu in?” or “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?” or “What is the average rainfall in Seattle?” Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn’t simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/wolfr...oing-to-be-big/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mike777 Posted March 9, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 9, 2009 Evolutionary success is all about looking out for number one - or so most biologists would tell you. The genes that do the best job of passing themselves along to the next generation, whether by brute selfishness or canny cooperation, are the ones that flourish - a view most memorably championed by Richard Dawkins more than 30 years ago in his bestselling book The Selfish Gene. This relentless focus on the gene may not tell the whole story, however. A small but growing coterie of evolutionary biologists argue that it leaves us blind to crucial evolutionary processes at higher scales - among groups, species and even whole ecosystem. If they are right, the popular view of evolution and the biological world needs a radical shake-up. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2012...s-doctrine.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kenrexford Posted March 9, 2009 Report Share Posted March 9, 2009 I tried a question, and all I got was "42." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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