200th post, Natural Language Engine

Don't know what a natural language engine is? Natural language means nothing more than the way we speak to one another. When you ask a person what there maiden name was. That person parses that question into its ideas: I the subject's, last name prior to name changes associated with marriage. It sounds simple but its a hard thing for computers to do.

"Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions -- like questions that have factual answers such as "What is the location of Timbuktu?" or "How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?," "What was the average rainfall in Boston last year?," "What is the 307th digit of Pi?," "where is the ISS?" or "When was GOOG worth more than $300?"

Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn't simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions."

see: http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/16550 for more.