Well calculated

The mathematician Conrad Wolfram straightens the image of his subject: "Mathematics is the engine of a computerized knowledge-based society," stresses the inventor of the search engine WolframAlpha. It is simply a good way of thinking about the world and making the opportunities of the information age usable, the DLD 2010 speaker says in a video interview conducted by the German newspaper Die Zeit.

He manifests that the knowledge society is on its way into a new era: the computerized knowledge-based society. It is no longer sufficient to have knowledge only in order to be successful economically. One must also use this knowledge for general problems.

At DLD 2010, Conrad describes the goal of the fundamentally different "knowledge engine" of Wolfram Alpha as getting the right answer out of the massive dataset. From the one end, Wolfram Alpha sucks in data and curates knowledge. From the other end, the engine attempts to understand linguistically what you are tipping in the box. The live computation between the two ends is done in a cloud and is sent back formatted to the webpage.

The "knowledge" engine goes into a key new direction. "It is a place where high power computation and knowledge meet - at an exciting time when data is getting democratized," Conrad concludes and offers an interesting allegory: "The common search engines work like librarians. Wolfram Alpha is like a personal research assistant to get exact answers."

For more visions on search find Conrad on the DLD 2010 panel "search" with fellow panellists Ben Gomes (Google), Blaise Agüera y Arcas (Bing), and Ilya Segalovich (Yandex) below.