About a month before Wolfram|Alpha launched, I was on the phone with a group from IBM, talking about our vision for computable knowledge in Wolfram|Alpha. A few weeks later, the group announced that they were going to use what they had done in natural language processing to try to make a system to compete on Jeopardy.
I thought it was a brilliant way to showcase their work—and IBM’s capabilities in general. And now, a year and a half later, IBM has built an impressive level of anticipation for their upcoming Jeopardy television event. Whatever happens (and IBM’s system certainly should be able to win), one thing is clear: what IBM is doing will have an important effect in changing people’s expectations for how they might be able to interact with computers.
When Wolfram|Alpha was launched, people at first kept on referring to it as a “new search engine”—because basically keyword search was the only model they had for how they might find information on a large scale. But IBM’s project gives a terrific example of another model: question answering. And when people internalize this model, they’ll be coming a lot closer to realizing what’s possible with what we’re building in Wolfram|Alpha.
So what really is the relation between Wolfram|Alpha and the IBM Jeopardy project?
