I'd like to be in the beta of alpha

Now THIS is cool. It may not yet be flying cars and my own personal robot, but it's getting there - the future is getting closer every day.

Stephen Wolfram writes:

Some might say that Mathematica and A New Kind of Science are ambitious projects.

But in recent years I’ve been hard at work on a still more ambitious project—called Wolfram|Alpha.

And I’m excited to say that in just two months it’s going to be going live.

Mathematica has been a great success in very broadly handling all kinds of formal technical systems and knowledge.

But what about everything else? What about all other systematic knowledge? All the methods and models, and data, that exists?

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.

But it didn’t work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that.

I’d always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realized that I was finally in a position to try to do it.

Excited? Me? Yes!

So naturally I've signed up for the beta of alpha.

It'll go live in May 2009 at http://www.wolframalpha.com/