The fledgling program, Wolfram Alpha, revealed at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards that many believe to be the Holy Grail of the Internet – a massive accumulation of data that understands and responds to regular language in the same manner a human does.

Even though the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet aficionados.

Computer experts believe that the new search engine could be an extraordinary leap in the evolution of the internet. Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, advised that Wolfram Alpha could prove equally as popular as Google. “It is really impressive and significant,” he wrote. “In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.”

Tom Simpson, of the blog www.convergenceofeverything.com, said: “What are the wider implications exactly? A new paradigm for using computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organizing internet? Possibly… I think this could be big.”

Wolfram Alpha will not only give a direct answer to queries like “how high is Mount Everest?”, but it will additionally create a organized page of related information – all properly annotated – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with charts and graphs.

The real innovation, however, is in its ability to sort things out “on the fly”, according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in “10 flips for four heads” and it will determine that you want to get the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the precise current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.

Dr. Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is equations.

“I’ve wanted to make the knowledge we’ve accumulated in our civilization computable,” he said last week. “I was not sure it was possible. I’m a little surprised it worked out so well.”

Dr. Wolfram, 49, who was educated at Eton and had completed his PhD in particle physics by the age of 20, added that the launch of Wolfram Alpha later this month would be only the beginning of the project.

“It will understand what you are talking about,” he said. “We are just at the beginning. I think we’ve got a reasonable start on 90 per cent of the shelves in a typical reference library.”

The engine, which will be free to use, computes by drawing on the knowledge of the internet, as well as non-public databases. Dr. Wolfram said he predicted that about 1,000 people would be needed to maintain its databases updated with the most recent discoveries and information.

Wolfram Alpha has been designed with experts and intellectuals in mind, so its grasp of popular culture is, at the moment, comparatively weak. The term “50 Cent” resulted in “absolute horror” in tests, for example, because it confused a discussion on currency with the American rap artist. For this reason alone it is unlikely to provide an immediate threat to Google, which is working on a similar type of search engine, a version of which it launched last week.

“We have a lot amount of popular culture facts,” Dr Wolfram said. “In some cases popular culture information is much more shallowly computable, so we can figure out who’s related to who and how tall people are. I certainly expect we will have lots of popular culture information. These are linguistic horrors because if you place in books and music a much of the names clash with other concepts.”

He added that to assist with that Wolfram Alpha would be utilizing Wikipedia’s popularity index to decide what users were likely to be interested in.

With Google now one of the world’s top brands, worth $100bn, Wolfram Alpha has the potential to become one of the biggest names on the planet.

Dr. Wolfram, however, did not rule out working with Google in the future, as well as Wikipedia. “We’re working to partner with all possible organisations that make sense,” he said. “Search, narrative, news are complementary to what we have. Hopefully there will be some great synergies.”

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