Jumping forward in time, we take note of the web-based Wolfram|Alpha (or WolframAlpha) answer engine, developed by Wolfram Research and consisting of 15 million lines of Mathematica code grounded in curated data bases, models, and algorithms for thousands of different domains. (Mathematica is a mathematically oriented high-level programming language developed by the British scientist Stephen Wolfram.) The system is tilted primarily towards quantitative questions (e.g., “What is the GDP of France?”, or “What is the surface area of the Moon?”) and often provides charts and graphics along with more direct answers. The interpretation of English queries into functions applied to various known objects is accomplished with the pattern matching and symbol manipulation capabilities of Mathematica.  However, the comprehension of English is not particularly robust at the time of writing. For example “How old was Lincoln when he died?”, “At what age did Lincoln die?” and other variants were not understood, though in many cases of misunderstanding, Wolfram|Alpha displays enough retrieved information to allow inference of an answer. A related shortcoming is that Wolfram|Alpha's quantitative skills are not supplemented with significant qualitative reasoning skills. For example, “Was Socrates a man?” (again, at the time of writing) prompts display of summary information about Socrates, including an image, but no direct answer to the question. Still, Wolfram|Alpha's quantitative abilities are not only interesting in stand-alone mode, but also useful as augmentations of search engines (such as Microsoft Bing) and of voice-based personal assistants such as Apple's Siri (see below).