Those of you who haven't seen as much SciFi as I may not be as astounded as you should. If you don't know what Wolfram|Alpha is yet, don't worry, it appears to have been kept secret until the preview. There's a completely mind boggling screencast available, showing off some basic usage, and an extensive compendium of example queries.
The examples areas vary wildly among several scientific areas, such as Mathematics, Physics, Engineering and Statistics (not surprisingly, since they're the creators of the arguably popular Mathematica app (wkp), which is also at least one of the backends of the whole deal), and of course, the very food for thought that made it possible, like CS, Web and Linguistics. There are also some very data-centric areas such as Unit conversion and Nutrition facts. Again, not at all surprising, yet (but wait, we're not there yet).
Considering the background from where it came, there are also other less obvious areas represented in the example sections, such as Life Sciences, Earth Sciences, Finances, Geography and Socioeconomic data, Meteorology. From a first look, the example section seems to encompass everything, the one encyclopedia to rule them all. Understandable absences are Human areas, but these areas have problems of their own.
If you paid attention to the screencast above, you noted that you don't have to make queries in standard query form (simplified version of the full phrases you actually think before querying): you can actually make questions in standard English. Although this is not new (Altavista could back in the day), the way it parses the information in the query is very impressive. Not only it has an almost telepathic ability to understand what you mean, even if you're not really sure how to question, it shows (and this is new for me) how it is parsing.
For example, from the screencast, if you type Springfield, you'll find out it's a very popular name for city, and Wolfram Alpha tells you it's assuming you're referring to the one in Massachusetts, and displays a wealth of data about it. If you want another Springfield, you can simply choose from a dropdown, and it will then show the pertinent data available.
For another example, I asked it "who are you" (trying to be cheeky), and was immediately knocked out my chair when the result came:
I took a few seconds to acknowledge it was actually an error (those cheeky wolfram people). After I caught my breath, I pressed reload and got the correct answer:
OK, no singularity there, folks. Pheew...
The most freaking experience so far is when you try to cross between completely unrelated databases and get coherent answers. Like those abusive queries you see the movie and TV detectives cross impossibly huge databases to narrow down suspects, or find relationships between perps and vics. Or even those impossible queries from Star Trek, when Data asks the computer to... extrapolate! (Wolfram people, tell me this is on your TODO list).
And for those of you who can't stand computers when off duty, know that Wolfram Alpha may very well become the substitute to your
Asimov would be proud. I mean, as long as wolfram Alpha abides to the Three Laws. But of course, no one would be crazy to create a singularity unconstrained, right? (Right, Cyberdyne??)
Next, a follow up post with some interesting queries to get started.
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