www.wolframalpha.com is going live at 7pm CST tonight, which I think is 2.00am Saturday morning here.

It's a search engine like Google, but unlike Google, it's "intelligent" - instead of giving you a list of links when you do a search, it gives you the data it thinks you might find useful. There's an Introduction on the web site which gives an idea of the way it works.

Does anyone else know more about it?

Just watched the demo, thanks for that!

It's the sort of thing I'll probably mess about with for far too long looking up silly things

Can it do the ironing?

Can it do the ironing?

Well, can it?

No - but it makes a mean baba ghanoush.

Not if the current results are anything to go by - I think it's got a long way to go yet.

I asked it "what is the ABRSM" and it said "do you mean Abram", and assuming it did, I now know that Abraham was born 3821 years ago in 1813BC and died aged 175 in 1638BC. Athough they don't know where, which is a bit remiss of them I feel

To be fair, I did some other searches, some of which returned good results - but not others. It will probably be brilliant eventually, just not sure when that will be

I heard about this on the Today programme (BBC Radio 4) from what I heard it is very America "centric" (don't you love that word) and is still very, very rough. I'll be sticking to my non-Google search engine.

I just asked it. It said "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input".

Yes I thought that too. I guess eventually they'll roll it out so that it's useful globally, or maybe somebody in the UK is developing a similar system which is "UK-centric".

Any bets on whether they get bought out by Google? Or should it be any bets on how long it will be before Google buys them out?

I asked it how many semiquavers in a semibreve (couldn't remember! )
and it came up with the correct answer.

It didn't do very well with a less direct question however.

I tried this today and wasn't very impressed. I seemed to spend more time trying to get it to understand me than I saved by not having to click through one more link on Google (for instance it understands "tallest mountain" but not "highest mountain"). Given how quickly you can find out stuff using wikipedia and google, it seems to be solving a non-existent problem.

It knows where god is

Excellent. Where is he then? I'd like to have a word with him

In fact he can have two words

Ask Wofram!

I was asking you!

YOu can always send me a PM

I would if your PM box wasn't always full...