Re: Wolfram Alpha

John V. and Frithjof,

JV> Looks like we can all pack up and go home.

FD> it is somewhat unsatisfying to not having more information
 > about the technologies behind ...

Doug Lenat has a good overview of their system:

    http://blog.cyc.com/2009/03/wolfram-alpha.html

 From that note and other sources, I would assume the following
summary of their technology:

  1. They are using databases of information that they have put
     together from various sources (including some they access
     dynamically for data about the weather or the stock market).

  2. They use a large collection of patterns of phrases (i.e.,
     templates) for recognizing four question types -- who, what,
     when, and where (with or without those actual question words).

  3. They have built mathematical/logical models (i.e., ontology
     plus a reasoning or computational method) for using the
     resources in #1 to answer questions of the types in #2.

  4. Their computational and logical methods are based on the
     very large and very sophisticated resources of Mathematica,
     which is the primary product of the Wolfram company:

     http://www.wolfram.com/

The original Mathematica product, which they began selling in 1988,
was based on Prolog.  Since then, they have developed their own
logic programming system, which has added many functions that go
far beyond plain vanilla Prolog.

The Mathematica product is widely used by major scientific and
engineering R & D institutions around the world.  (By the way,
we use it at VivoMind for testing our mathematical algorithms
before translating them to a lower-level language for better
performance.)

John


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