How does Wolfram Alpha work?

Question

Behind the tables and tables of raw data, how does Wolfram Alpha work?

I imagine there are various artificial intelligence mechanisms driving the site but I can't fathom how anyone would put something like this together. Are there any explanations that would help a programmer understand how something like this is created? Does the knowledge base learn on its own or is it taught very specific details in a very organized manner? What kind of structure and language is used to store this type of data?

Obviously this is a huge question and can't fully be answered here but some of the general concepts would be nice to know so I can build off of them and do my own research.

Answer 1

Take a look at the API

Answer 2

This official blog post has some portion of the explanation: the language Mathematica.

Answer 3

Looks like a large number of algorithms from which some that might be relevant are selected by pattern matching.

Answer 4

Does the knowledge base learn on its own or is it taught very specific details in a very organized manner?

AI systems are usually something distinctly in between. The system will usually learn in a directed way, where the developers can apply a metric that measures the quality of the learning, and the system learns by attempting to maximise that metric. Where the expertise comes in is in developing efficient and effective representations of the data, so that it lends itself to this learning process and to the measurement of how well the learning is going.