Wolfram Blog : Exploring Logo Designs with Mathematica
http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/02/26/exploring-logo-designs-with-mathematica/

Mathematica is a flexible tool for exploring graphic design programmatically. Study and manipulation of logos and fonts are featured in this example.

This is a very cool idea.

via Nova Spivack: 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 is the location of Timbuktu?" or "How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?," "What was the average rainfall in Boston last year?," "What is the 307th digit of Pi?," or "what would 80/20 vision look like?"

Wolfram Research introduces a search engine

And now, in 2009, a new kind of browser search engine called Wolfram|Alpha is about to appear. The other day I talked to Stephen on the phone for about two hours, and he demonstrated some of Wolfram|Alpha’s powers via a web-conferencing hook-up. In the following, I’ll be paraphrasing his words, based on my notes, my memory, and an audio recording of our conversation.

Stephen Wolfram

Wolfram|Alpha can pop out an answer to pretty much any kind of factual question that you might pose to a scientist, economist, banker, or other kind of expert. The exciting part is that you’re not just looking up pages on the web, you’re getting new information that’s generated by computations working from the known data. Wolfram says the response can be so speedy because, “We’ve found that, of all the things science can compute, most take a second or less.”

"... Wolfram|Alpha can pop out an answer to pretty much any kind of factual question that you might pose to a scientist, economist, banker, or other kind of expert. The exciting part is that you’re not just looking up pages on the web, you’re getting new information that’s generated by computations working from the known data. Wolfram says the response can be so speedy because, “We’ve found that, of all the things science can compute, most take a second or less.” ..." [Accessed Tuesday, 14th April, 2009]

Another query with a very sophisticated result was "uncle's uncle's brother's son." Now if you type that into Google, the result will be a useless list of sites that don't even answer this specific question, but Alpha actually returns an interactive genealogic tree with additional information, including data about the 'blood relationship fraction,' for example (3.125% in this case).

The hype around Wolfram|Alpha, the next "Google killer" from the makers of Mathematica, has been building over the last few weeks. Today, we were lucky enough to attend a one-hour web demo with Stephen Wolfram, and from what we've seen, it definitely looks like it can live up to the hype - though, because it is so different from traditional search engines, it will definitely not be a "Google killer."

More impressions on Wolfram Alpha question answering engine

Droste

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