Wolfram Sets the Timer, Will Blow Away Factual Search in May

Go take a look at Wolfram Alpha.



It's a "computational knowledge engine." Sounds impressive, doesn't it? It definitely has the potential to completely blow away any factual search engine that has come previously, of which the most prominent example may be Powerset.

The brains behind this, Stephen Wolfram, is an acclaimed computer scientist that has had many incredible creations already, including the heavily used software package Mathematica, which adds jaw-dropping features in every release, and the stunning if controversial book A New Kind of Science, so he definitely has the background and the resources to create a good factual search engine. In fact, Wolfram has frequently posited, both in A New Kind of Science, and other sources, that he believes computation can be a valid representation of knowledge and science. Hence, Wolfram Alpha is based on what VentureBeat describes well as "terabytes of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms" to create a representation of computable human knowledge.

While I can't say anything to the efficacy of this--it may blow all of us away come May, or it could be the next Cuil--it will definitely be a step forward in the problem of factual search. With Wolfram's entire focus behind this project, and with the concession that this is still a work in progress, I do hope that this will actually work much better than Powerset (which is not to say anything bad about Powerset--they were a little underwhelming, but technically, I can see the incredible technology and useful research that went into building it).

If anyone can get me early access to Wolfram Alpha, I would owe you a big one.

Play Video Games. Beat Molecular Biologists. Feel Good.

Harnessing the millions of easily distractable minds worldwide, groundbreaking science is being done. Rosetta@Home, the software that is modeled after Stanford's Folding@Home and designed for distributed calculation and prediction for 3D protein shapes on millions of computers worldwide, now has a new feature. As the Economist article describes, the new Rosetta@Home software contains a game in which users (players) can manipulate the 3D protein structure according to basic laws of chemistry and physics in order to minimize energy. This was created due to the fact that 3D protein alignments and folding are still hugely computationally intensive, and often, the best 3D structures are found by molecular biologists working by hand rather than a computer using a heuristic algorithm. Moreover, humans often find these optimal structures faster than would the Rosetta@Home distributed computing network. There are some friendly competitions going on already.

The genetic revolution may soon yield one more life-saving product, an effective therapy for cystic fibrosis in the form of, surprisingly, a drug already on the market that is currently used to treat depression. See this abstract from Science.