Stephen Wolfram tells Mashable that his Wolfram Alpha answer engine has handled nearly 100 million queries since its launch 11 days ago and explains the rationale behind ensuring that the answers to many of them would be well-known cultural references masquerading as fact instead of boring citations to the source material — or even his own best attempts at a "real" answer.
Because nothing is more fun than trying to find the flaws in a machine we quickly discovered that the designers of the answer engine had a sense of humor. Wolfram Alpha doesn't know everything, and isn't supposed to be a pop culture reference tool. But it does "know," among other things, that the answer to the secret of life is "42" — according to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, anyway — and that 88 MPH is the speed Marty McFly needs to reach in his flux-capacitor-modded DeLorean to travel in time.
“I think they are part of the corpus of cultural knowledge," Wolfram told Mashable. "The fact that so many people know them sort of makes them as relevant as some much more staid piece of knowledge. Realistically, it seemed that for quite a lot of people … that those common cultural things are the first thing that come to mind.”
At least as interesting was the impish decision to reveal the answer as a "truth," rather than as a cultural reference, which would have been just as easy. That's just the sort of prankish decision the boys on the Big Bang Theory might make.
But, Wolfram reveals, the decision to include cultural references and easter eggs didn’t come without some argument. He said he had nearly decided write his own answer to “What is the meaning of life?“
As much as we'd like to hear what a former prodigy in particle physics thinks about that, it probably reduced to "42" anyway.
Wolfram Alpha Approaches 100 Million Queries [Mashable]
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