Education Law

Building a knowledge engine

No, we’re not talking about a search engine. Although some news sources incorrectly label it a Google killer, Wolfram Alpha should not be compared to Google or Microsoft’s new Bing.  It considers itself a knowledge engine. Ask it a question, and it computes the answer. Google just serves up existing information that may or may not contain the answer to your actual question. Wolfram Alpha will actually look at it’s own dataset, consisting of 10+ trillion of pieces of data and 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and calculate the answer.

What does this mean? According to the project,

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Thus users can submit custom queries to the service, and Wolfram Alpha will try to “compute” the answer on the fly. The project is only in its infancy, and still has a ways to go. But the results to questions it can answer are fascinating. For example, you may wish to know the number of calories in a bowl of corn flakes and a glass of OJ. The answer: 290, and it gives you the nutritional breakdown you didn’t even request. Thinking something a little more complicated? How about the vapor pressure of ethanol at 300 Kelvin? 0.008212 MPa  (megapascals). Trying to decode a cryptogram like ”krkrpl.” It can do that too.

BoardBuzz was intrigued to say the least. This type of service definitely has applications in education, and it probably raises some issues as well. Academic citation being the first to cross our minds. But guess what. Wolfram Alpha even takes care of that. Every answered query provides a complete list of background sources. It also provides citations to its own dataset.

This could definitely make science and math homework a little easier. What do you think?

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on June 09, 2009 (boomark / email).