Over the past half a century, we have gradually become more addicted to computers, but how much have these systems really developed? Computers are now able to answer a lot of questions, and we probably wouldn’t even know what to do if we didn’t have them. However, we still haven’t succeeded in making them answer a factual question, but that might change soon.

Stephen Wolfram, the author of Mathematica and A New Kind of Science, announced that in two months’ time, a new ambitious project called Wolfram Alpha will go live. As Wolfram explained in a blog post last week, Wolfram Alpha was created from his two main ingredients, Mathematica and NKS:

“With Mathematica, I had a symbolic language to represent anything – as well as the algorithmic power to do any kind of computation. And with NKS, I had a paradigm for understanding how all sorts of complexity should arise from simple rules.”

 Wolfram explained that despite accumulating billions of pages of text on the web, out of which we can easily obtain specific terms and phrases with the help of search engines, we can’t compute from that, and we can only answer questions that have been asked before. This in turn means that we are not able to find anything new.

While some people expressed belief that we could obtain that by understanding the natural language that exists on the web, Wolfram said there is another way: “explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable.”

However, the problem of interacting with that system that is now capable of delivering a lot more still remains tricky and making computers deal with natural language on the web.

“But if one’s already make knowledge computable, one doesn’t need to do that kind of natural language understanding,” Wolfram wrote. “All one need to be able to do is take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do.”

Easy to say, yet very hard to do, especially since people will want this computational knowledge engine to be able to handle more than just the English language for example, he continued. However, he believes, a combination of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, but also theoretical breakthroughs, will do the trick.

“It is certainly the most complex project I’ve ever undertaken,” Wolfram wrote, “involving far more kinds of expertise – and more moving parts – than I’ve ever had to assemble before.”

The website, which will be available in May this year for a select number of individuals, will give users access to trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms. “That almost gets us to what people thought computers would be able to do 50 years ago.”