Wolfram what?

WolframAlpha.. the world’s first computational knowledge engine recently launched by Wolfram Research Inc in the United States. If you’re not quite sure what this means, join the club. It took me some time to get my head around it. The best way of understanding Wolfram is imagine a calculator with a search box instead of a numeric keypad.

Wolfram is first and foremost a giant calculator with a built-in library of data models, algorithms and mathematical equations from all fields of study including engineering, physics, chemistry and finance. These formulas can be used to calculate the answer to any given set of inputs.

Wolfram is also a massive collection of curated data. Enter the input “commonwealth bank of Australia” and you’ll receive historical and real-time information about the company’s stock price performance, average returns and volatility.

This data is completely comparable against similar data sets. Entering the combined input “RMIT University, Melbourne University” returns a two-column comparison of students, fees, founding dates, school mottos and so on.

How is this useful on a day-to-day basis? Here’s two scenarios in which Wolfram could help:

• I’m a property professional and want a more accurate “back-of-the-envelope” calculation about the present value of a future stream of rental income cash flows. Enter the input “discounted cash flow” and you’ll be prompted with the fields necessary to perform the calculation.
• My daughter needs to calculate the area of a circle, but she’s left her book at school and I’ve forgotten the equation. Enter the input “area of a circle” and Wolfram returns either the equation itself, or the answer along with the steps it took to perform the calculation.

Wolfram has the ability calculate, compare or convert just about anything.. but In contrast to Google Search which can find information, Wolfram actually creates information – at least in a form that may not have been aggregated before. The fact that Wolfram takes the additional step and performs the calculation also distinguishes it from knowledge sites like Encyclopaedia Britannica Online and the community driven Wikipedia.

The features of Wolfram that impress me the most are:

• Presentation of the website: simple, neat and extremely consistent. This improves usability and reduces the delivery time of answers to my burning questions.
• The sheer amount of data and calculation capacity of the site. Wolfram hopes to implement “every known model, method and algorithm”. That’s a lot of potentially useful data.
• The site only produces objective data. “Only what is known, is known to Wolfram”. If the data is factual, this arguably makes it more reliable.

The features of the website where Wolfram points to its ‘Alpha’ label are the ‘fuzzy logic’ algorithms for user input, otherwise known as the hints which warn the user about syntax errors and make suggestions for better queries. The input support is almost non-existent on Wolfram at present, here are a few examples.

• Entering the input “commonwealth bank” yields absolutely zero results. Only by adding the words “of Australia” delivered the results.
• Typing in “twitter” yielded the definition “a series of chirps” – obviously not the information about a popular website with recent explosive growth that I was after.

This being said, Wolfram is an impressive site which will no doubt impress in the future and provide real value to computer users.

For now, the best way to use it is know what you’re looking for, use the field categories (geography, mathematics, etc) and use as few input terms as possible.

Written for PC Update magazine, July Edition: http://www.melbpc.org.au/pcupdate/2907/2907article5.htm