Wolfram|Alpha is a new project from the makers of Mathematica set to launch in May. Something like a search engine, but instead of searching for answers to queries it computes them.
In a related post, Nova Spivack writes;
"Wolfram's team manually entered, and in some cases automatically pulled in, masses of raw factual data about various fields of knowledge, plus models and algorithms for doing computations with the data. By building all of this in a modular fashion on top of the Mathematica engine, they have built a system that is able to actually do computations over vast data sets representing real-world knowledge. More importantly, it enables anyone to easily construct their own computations -- simply by asking questions."
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