Google Killers

When I was a freshman at UIUC, I lived in a dorm with a guy who was also in the computer engineering program. One day he told me that he was working part time in Stephen Wolfram's lab. I nodded, because I had no clue who Stephen Wolfram was.

Over the next couple of years, I had become quite familiar with Dr. Wolfram, or at least with the flagship product, Mathematica, developed by his company, Wolfram Research. By the time I graduated, Mathematica was used to teach all the freshman calculus courses at the University of Illinois. And of course, it became the de facto standard in the world of science and mathematics.

I hadn't really thought about Stephen Wolfram for at least a decade, when after going into seclusion for ten years, he released A New Kind of Science, a controversial book that claimed it was going to change the world.

Despite the claims, and a bit of controversy between Wolfram and his critics, it seems that the book has now sailed into obscurity, and I once again put Stephen Wolfram out my mind. Yet to my surprise, he is taking another shot at fame and fortune with Wolfram Alpha, which he claims will be a Google Killer. However, he will have to compete against the formidable Watson supercomputer from IBM to win this title.

Read about it on the SingularityHub blog.