Wolfram Alpha
A while ago wolfram research announced that they were developing Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine that could answer questions on the internet. As this is exactly what we do at True Knowledge we were quite interested in how this all worked and how well it worked. Wolframs knowledge engine is written in mathmatica, a language that was developed at wolfram research whereas True Knowledge are using more standard languages, our core knowledge engine is written in C++ and runs on reletively tame comodity hardware whereas wolfram uses some serious kit - as can be seen on YouTube.
Wolfram Alpha has been getting a lot of publicity recently - helped in part due to its founder Stephen Wolfram - and most of it has been encouraging for them and the space in general. Their lauch on Friday was hit with a few snags but they seem to have got the system up and running - well I’ve been able to give it a try anyway. From my experience it seems to be pretty good at factual based questions such as how old/what is but it hasn’t been able to ask any questions that involve an extra step of reasoning over working out what was in the question - apart from obvious cases. That happens to be one of the very things that the True Knowledge system is very good at for example try the ‘Who was prime minister when micheal schumacher was a teenager’ question that I had in my True Knowledge API lauch post, the wolfram page for that is still spinning three minutes later. When they do give a response it does tend to have lots of information about the answer rather than a simple answer though. For example try ‘Halstead uk’, you get the population, weather information etc…
One of the main differences is the fact that you can’t add information or knowledge to Wolfram, True Knowledge builds on user generated content, much like wikipedia, this means that when it can’t answer but does understand, it can let you add the required information and then the question can be answered, whoever asks.
Give them both a try and see what you think!
Good Hunting
I think… if I hear the words Wolfram and Alpha in the same sentence again I’m probably going to scream - or hit you - or both!