Stephen Wolfram, post-boy-genius ego­ma­niac and author of the book that received the best bad review ever, is making a search engine. Except it’s not a “search” engine exactly, because it doesn’t look for web­sites that have the answer to your ques­tion on them, it fig­ures out the answer to your question.

How? If the descrip­tions of the engine I’ve read are accu­rate, and they can’t be, it essen­tially runs a model of the world, con­structed of all the the­o­ret­ical con­structs which Wolfram an co. have been able to rep­re­sent in some kind of Mathematica-based ur-language and a mas­sive pile of curated raw data on every­thing. So I sup­pose if you ask it “how long would it take for me to fall from 30 000 feet”, it deter­mines seman­ti­cally that you are asking a ques­tion about gravitic physics, cal­cu­lates dis­tances, speeds, resis­tances, and masses, and tells you a number. And if you ask it, “will it hurt?”, it fires up it’s nueron-emergent model of the brain and says, “yes”.

Or some­thing. I don’t know. Look, it’s pos­sible Wolfram really is a genius and not just a strong tech­ni­cian, and con­se­quently could be building a rev­o­lu­tionary search engine which com­men­su­rates knowl­edge from diverse con­cep­tual domains into a mean­ing­fully live intel­li­gence grower. I’m cer­tainly curious to find out.

Yesterday there was 2 hour web­cast demoing the engine. I’m not curious enough to watch it. But they’re promising it will go public in May. What ques­tions do you have?