Only a couple of months since its launch, Wolfram Alpha, has made long lasting impressions to tech savvies and computer gurus! If not to the most, at least to me! Wolfram Alpha is an ‘answer engine’ developed and maintained by ‘Wolfram research’. Alpha is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might.

As far as Alpha’s basic querying procedure is concerned, users submit queries and computation requests via a text field. Alpha then computes and logically concludes answers and relevant visualizations from a core knowledge base of structured data. Alpha thus differs from general search engines, which index (search) a large number of answers and then tries to match the question to one.

As Alpha is built on Wolfram’s earlier flagship Mathematics’ product, Mathematica, it provides the user any query related to Mathematics. The answers usually present human-readable solution. For example, entering x^2+y^2+2xy as an input, will be interpreted as x2+y2+2xy. This input will give the user its alternate algebraic form, geometric figure, graph representation, its derivates, partial derivatives, indefinite integration and some lot more stuff. That’s more than enough for a high-level research on x2+y2+2xy!

However, Wolfram Alpha is also capable of responding to natural-language fact-based questions such as "Where was Mahatma Gandhi born?" or more complex questions such as “How old was Jawaharlal Nehru in 1953?” It is also capable of performing calculations on data using more than one source. For example, "What is the fifty-second smallest country by GDP per capita?" yields India, $725.76 per year, as the answer.

The database currently includes hundreds of datasets, including all Current and historical Weather. The datasets have been accumulated over approximately two years, and will continue to grow. The range of questions that can be answered will grow with the expansion of the datasets. Alpha is written in 5 million lines of Mathematica code and runs on 10,000 CPUs (as prior to its launch!)!

Well, this makes a conclusion that, Wolfram Alpha is too good for anybody to get information regarding popular people, any city’s weather info along with detailed pollution and climatic analysis, any law of physics, any element, again with the detailed info of Chemistry, anything of Maths and a lot of more subjects too! This makes a perfect choice as an emergency alternative as your problem solving guide. Hence, give it a try; you’ll love it, once you know to use it. I am addicted to it!