Stephen Wolfram Q&A

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Some collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram

Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.

November 3, 2011

From: Interview by Mark Jannot, Popular Science

Is it fair to say that the fundamental aim of Wolfram|Alpha is to foster and democratize computational knowledge?

That’s what we’re trying to do. That’s the big effort. That’s the thing: Absent these various realizations, one might have thought that with computational knowledge, we’ll really not be able to get very far; it’s very specialized and won’t be able to be generally useful. And for me, that’s the big metadiscovery of the past two years: that at this time in history, it’s actually possible to do this. I don’t think it will get progressively easier to do it—there’s not going to be a dramatic moment when it gets much easier—but it sort of came over the horizon, it became possible, and it will gradually get easier. But this is the time.

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