Wolfram Alpha for more advanced maths.
And at the moment I'd say it was 50-50," says Wolfram Gruhler, a Mittelstand-watcher at the German Economic Institute in Cologne.In this section The strange life of low-tech America It ain't necessarily so What next?
What customers would really like, to judge by letters they send to DF1's director of programmes, Wolfram Winter, is hard-core pornography--a category of entertainment which, he says, accounts for some 60% of all video rentals in Germany.
Not surprisingly, the result is self-indulgent in places: Mr Wolfram lists every model of computer and programming language he has used since childhood, and estimates that while writing the book, he typed 100 million keystrokes and moved his computer mouse more than 100 miles.None of which bodes well for the book's content.
Mr Wolfram, a British-born prodigy who published his first scientific paper at 15, won a MacArthur genius grant at 21 and then made a fortune in the software business, exercised total control over the project.
Mr Wolfram unashamedly compares the potential impact of his work to that of Sir Isaac Newton's "Principia Mathematica", and suggests that his discoveries can answer long-standing puzzles in mathematics, physics, biology and philosophy, from the fundamental laws of nature to the question of free will.
Dr Wolfram is hardly the first scientist to compare the human brain to a computer.
NKS absolutely gives us a competitive advantage".Instead of laboriously constructing an algorithm to solve a particular problem, Wolfram Research hunts for candidate programs using NKS mining the computational universe in just the way that Dr Wolfram believes nature itself does.
Dr Wolfram presented his ideas at the TED conference in California in 2010, and the audience tittered as he casually likened his creation of Mathematica with Galileo's construction of a telescope, and claimed that NKS was superior to the mathematics-based science of the past 300 years, thus comparing himself implicitly with Newton.
Yet simple queries such as "climate change" or "Gordon Brown" will yield the equivalent of an empty stare.Omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent?The goal Dr Wolfram has set himself is to take all the knowledge civilisation has amassed and make it computable in other words, render it as potential inputs to logical queries that can be crunched to produce answers.
"Wolfram Alpha today is shockingly similar to ideas I first had when I was 12 years old," he says.
