Whether or not machines can quickly answer yes-or-no questions could affect everything from national security to the limits of human knowledge On a snowy day in Princeton, N.J., in March 1956, a short ...

Editor’s note: Below is a guest post from Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, about a new computational knowledge engine called Wolfram Alpha being developed by computer scientist Stephen Wolfram.

Since the 1930s, the theory of computation has profoundly influenced philosophical thinking about topics such as the theory of the mind, the nature of mathematical knowledge and the prospect of ...