Revolutionary Wolfram 'knowledge engine' goes live

London, May 19(ANI): Wolfram Alpha, the revolutionary web tool that calculates and computes your queries instead of directing you to other sources of information, has gone live.

The new system, being hailed as a significant rival to search giant Google, is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram, reports the BBC.

The online 'computational knowledge engine' was unveiled in late April and since then has been publicly demonstrated and some people have had a chance to run queries through it.

Typically, the results it provides are annotated pages of data rather than a simple list of other sites that might help resolve a user's query.

Users can ask known facts from Wolfram Alpha, such as the height of mountains, or it can be asked to generate new information such as up to date figures for a nation's GDP.

It can also handle complicated mathematical queries, plot statistics and produce charts of natural events.

The data it consults is chosen and managed by staff at Wolfram Research who ensure it can be displayed by the system.

Behind the scenes, Wolfram Alpha has about 10,000 CPUs spread across five data centres that it draws on when generating answers.

During a demonstration at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Wolfram said: "Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime."

Wolfram dismissed claims that the system is a potential Google killer and instead presents it as a way for people to get more out of the information on the web. (ANI)