Artificial intelligence (AI) is the branch of computer science that is concerned with making computers behave like humans. The term was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The idea of AI is at least in popular culture closely related to machines becoming more intelligent than humans. Soon this may become true.
Wolfram Alpha s a computational knowledge engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from externally sourced "curated data", rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might.
Wolfram Alpha, was released on May 15, 2009 and is based on Wolfram’s earlier flagship product Mathematica, a computational platform or toolkit that encompasses computer algebra, symbolic and numerical computation, visualization, and statistics capabilities.
In the TED talk below, Stephen Wolfram, the systems creator, talks about his quest to make all knowledge computational, able to be searched, processed and manipulated. His new search engine, Wolfram Alpha, has no lesser goal than to model and explain the physics underlying the universe.