A British physicist has revealed his plan to launch a new internet search engine so powerful that one expert has suggested it "could be as important as Google".
London-born scientist Stephen Wolfram says that his company, Wolfram Research, is preparing to unveil the system in two months' time.
Known as Wolfram Alpha, the site is an attempt to address some of the deficiencies of current web search by understanding people's questions and answering them directly.
"Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they'd quickly be able to handle all these kinds of things … and that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question and have it compute the answer," he wrote on the Wolfram Research website.
"But it didn't work out that way … I'd always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realised that I was finally in a position to try and do it."
According to its creator, the system understands questions that users input and then calculates the answers based on its extensive mathematical and scientific engine.
Natural language processing – the ability to determine – has long been a holy grail for computer scientists, who believe for interacting with machines in an instinctive way. And that, says Wolfram, is part of the code that Alpha has cracked.
"The way humans normally communicate is through natural language – and when one's dealing with the whole spectrum of knowledge, I think that's the only realistic option for communicating with computers too," he wrote.
"Of course, getting computers to deal with natural language has turned out to be incredibly difficult. And, for example, we're still very far away from having computers systematically understand large volumes of natural language text on the web."
Other search engines, such as Google, compare search terms against billions of documents stored on its servers, before pointing to the pages on which the correct answer is probably kept.
Although this method has proved phenomenally successful, many computer scientists have continued trying to create a system that can understand human language.
One of the most recent to claim a breakthrough was Powerset, which raised $12.5m (£8.9m) in funding and was under development for several years – but only released a limited search engine for Wikipedia before being bought by Microsoft for $100m last year.
According to Nova Spivack, the founder of another intelligent web service, Twine, Alpha is far more impressive than what has gone before.
"Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain," he wrote. "It provides extremely impressive and thorough questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers – it doesn't merely look them up in a big database."
The plan is already gaining media attention, but the 49-year-old is used to getting noticed for his exploits. After studying at Eton and Oxford, Wolfram went on to receive his PhD in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology at the age of 20 .
As a result he was awarded a Macarthur genius grant in 1981, and later generated a mixture of applause and opprobrium with his famous book, A New Kind of Science. In it, he suggested that simple algorithms, rather than complex rules and structures, could be at the root of all science.
Reaction to the idea – which Wolfram said could boil down to a computer program consisting of just "three or four lines of code" – was mixed.
Some critics felt that Wolfram unfairly refused to submit his theories to peer review in the decade that he worked on the book, while others claimed he courted publicity by building up the image of a reclusive genius.
Whatever the outcome of Wolfram's audacious claims, however, his track record is strong. One of his previous creations, the computer program Mathematica, is now used by many scientists to help them with their work.
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