The Engine That Thinks: Wolfram Alpha

by aoaob on 2009-05-21 12:34:04

The sentence "I am a computational knowledge engine." is the response given by Wolfram Alpha when you type "who are you?" in its search bar.

Wolfram Alpha is a remarkable and powerful "computational knowledge engine" developed by Stephen Wolfram and his team. Although it doesn’t associate your keywords with countless web pages like a powerful search engine such as Google, it tries to directly answer your questions instead. In other words, Wolfram Alpha can process and respond to your queries logically.

It can also tell you things like it only speaks one language—English—or how long it has been operational. It even answers questions indirectly; for example, if you ask it "Are you self-aware?", it replies, "I perform general computations."