Stephen Wolfram is on a search for the theory of everything

Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, is on a mission. A mission to understand everything — and we mean everything. Since he was a child, he had the idea of systematizing knowledge and making it useful to the world. With the knowledge and resources he has gathered from being the creator of Mathematica for 23 years, along the way he decided to see how much of the world’s knowledge he could systematize — and he was happy with the results. So inspired was he, that he created Wolfram Alpha.

At first look, you might think Wolfram Alpha is just another internet search engine. But it’s not. Not at all. It’s a “computational knowledge engine,” meaning, it generates output by doing computations against its own internal knowledge base, instead of the search engine model of searching the web and returning links.

You won’t find a Wolfram Alpha search box, you find a question box into which you type your question in natural language, and the program then computes the answer by applying your question to the systematized data. It does not search what others have written before, but computes its answers with methods, models and algorithms. So far, more than 80% of queries are answered correctly.

While you could simply ask Wolfram Alpha things like “How much greater is the per capita GDP of the United States than Mexico?” (answer it gave: 353.9%), that is not what this genius-on-a-mission is after. He wants nothing less than to have computation discover the rules of our universe.

He ends his talk with this passionate explanation of his quest:

I’ve been working on the idea of computation now for over thirty years, building tools and methods and sort of turning intellectual ideas into millions of lines of code and grist for server farms and so on. With every passing year, I realize how much more powerful the idea of computation actually is. It’s taken us a long way already, but there’s so much more to come. From the foundations of science to the limits of technology, to the very definition of the human condition, I think computation is destined to be the defining idea of our future.

What do you think? On the one hand, it is quite impressive and performs astonishing things. On the other hand, since it relies on having all information at it’s fingertips, a) can it keep up in a world of knowledge expanding at an exponential rate, and b) can we rely on the accuracy of its database (think Wikipedia)?

Whatever the answer is, Wolfram has the intellect, the financial resources and the passion to continue this project, which is already democratizing the ability of non-experts to perform complex computations.

February 2010

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