Wolfram Alpha is Cool

I recently encountered a new technology called Wolfram Alpha, and I think it is very cool.

So what is Wolfram Alpha? It is an answer engine. Unlike a search engine like Google, Wolfram Alpha attempts to provide straight forward and simple answer, rather than a list of web pages that may provide the answer.

For example, if I type in "hong kong population" to Wolfram Alpha, it will tell me it is 6.94 million people. If I type in "Citizen Kane", it will tell me it is a movie that is directed by Orson Welles, released in 1941. If I type in "35 + 27", it will tell me the answer is 62. If I type in "convert US $35 to hong kong dollar", it will give me $272.46. That is freaking amazing.

Obviously, Wolfram Alpha does not have all the answers in the world, but for whatever it knows, it seems to be able to find it quickly and provide a straight forward answer.

Another interesting fact is Wolfram Alpha is written using Mathematica, a symbolic computation application. This is quite different from a typical online database which is probably written using some variants of standard programming languages such as Java or php, and accessing a database behind it.

This choice of implementation is probably significant. Whatever the underlying technology is, Wolfram Alpha's logic is probably operating at a more abstract level than something that is written in a standard programming language.