Wolfram Alpha going live this weekend

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A webcast from Wolphram Alpha has announced it will be going fully live on Monday with a live TV broadcast on justin.tv across the weekend showing the “throwing of the switch” to test the site.

In a pre-launch webcast, Steven Wolfram, developer of the engine, said: “As far as we know this has never been tried before. There are so many things that could go wrong but whatever does go wrong you will get to see it live as it happens.”

The advanced search engine that allows users to type in fact based questions and quickly receive an in-depth answer, often with associated graphs and statistics, was announced in March this year. It differs from other search engines such as Google as it gives you exact answers to your queries rather than websites that may relate to them.

In the webcast there was clearly some apprehension, with Wolfram's colleague Taylor Gray saying “If we do melt down live it won't be from lack of effort” but with the high interest and Gray predicting an “overwhelming response” some teething problems are no doubt expected.

Gray listed possible obstacles such as software configurations, servers going down, even power cuts due to thunder storms. But the industry at large, including IT PRO wait with anticipation to see what goes right with the system, as well wrong.

Click here to see what readers want to ask Wolfram Alpha and make sure you check back to see how the launch went.

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