What is the Engine 42 Project?
Engine 42 will attempt to answer any question asked by natural language queries. That’s right — answers to all questions of life, the Universe, and everything!
But that’s impossible!
If that’s impossible, we’re in good company. Radio, television, space travel, cell phones — they were all impossible at some point.
How will Engine 42 work?
The world is full of answers, and even more full of questions. We don’t have a good way of taking a question and hooking it up with answers that often already exist.
Engine 42 is the matchmaker between all the world’s questions and answers.
Engine 42 Parts and Pieces
Question Engine
- Provides different ways for people and machines to submit questions to Engine 42.
Simple web form, APIs, etc. - Requests clarification for ambiguous questions.
- Breaks questions in to smaller, atomic questions.
This is the most important part!
Answer Engine
Searches sources for answers to small questions.
- Wikipedia
- Wolfram|Alpha
- Yahoo Answers
- Aardvark
- Engine 42′s own answer site
- Engine 42′s own prediction markets site
- Etc. Ad Infinitum
Interact Engine
For unanswered small questions, automatically submits questions to resources such as answer sites.
Reputation Engine
Assigns reputation values to various answer sources, in near real time.
- Reputation of answer site
- Reputation of user on site
- Answer Engine considers reputations when choosing amongst competing answers for a question.
Audit Engine
Stores all activity for every question.
Retry Engine
As the answers to smaller questions change, the retry engine looks at questions that used that answer in the past. These questions are resubmitted to see if the final answer might differ positively by incorporating the answer changes.
More Information
Also see “Greater Detail about Engine 42.”