Wolfram Alpha to screen launch live

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 15 May 2009 at 12:05

Wolfram Alpha, the new computational search engine, plans to televise its launch in a live webcast.

The search engine is slated to go live on Monday - but its founders have announced that they'll be documenting the final tests in real time as they take place over the weekend.

Given the enormity of the project, you'd forgive Wolfram Research for keeping the doors closed in case things go wrong, but it's clear the group considers the launch a matter for posterity.

"We've been rather surprised that we haven't been able to find even a single publicly available record of the commissioning of any large website at all," says designer Stephen Wolfram. "So we thought we would document our own experience.

He then swiftly moves on to the disclaimer: "We can't guarantee that everything will go smoothly. We fully expect to encounter unanticipated situations along the way. We hope that it'll be interesting for people to join us as we work through these in real time."

Wolfram Alpha is based on Mathematica and Wolfram's own New Kind of Science which should allow users to ask it factual questions in natural language. It will then compute an answer, rather than Google's approach of simply returning pages that might contain relevant information.

Read our very own Jon Honeyball getting very excited about Wolfram Alpha in the current issue of PC Pro.