In 2009, Dr Stephen Wolfram, the enfant terrible of contemporary science, released a breathtaking computer program that creates a completely new way to handle and query complex human knowledge.
Even though his program is still in its infancy, it already poses a real threat to the search-engine technology used by Google and others. He has created nothing less than a new approach to machine-based problem solving.
A former child prodigy who published articles on quantum physics at the age of 17, Wolfram is best known as the inventor of the widely used Mathematica program.
His new knowledge-computation engine, called Wolfram/Alpha, is based on his Mathematica system. It is able to solve all sorts of scientific queries and problems users may have.
However, try the same sort of queries with Google or Yahoo and all you will get is long lists of references mentioning the same words you just typed in. Underlying the program is a fresh conception of science, one Wolfram first proposed in 2002 in his book A New Kind of Science.
Wolfram realised that even the most complex computer programs with millions of lines of code may not be able to solve difficult scientific problems.