During his day, Aristotle was known for deep knowledge about all scientific disciplines, and his ability to teach science. Vulcan, the venture capital arm of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is funding a long-term project to develop a computer program that might eventually serve as an Aristotle for our times. The goal is to develop computers that can answer scientific questions they've never heard before, and show the reasoning behind their answers. It's called Project Halo, and in one early test, it was able to correctly answer three out of five questions taken from an advanced placement chemistry exam.

Noah Friedland is Project Halo Manager.

FRIEDLAND: There are two primary visions for what it is we want to accomplish. The first is an interactive tutor that can teach students the sciences. The second is an interdisciplinary research assistant that could help scientists in their research work. In the latter case you can imagine a situation where these various scientific communities, because of all the knowledge that exists, have become focused on very narrow areas. The big advantage of the "digital Aristotle" will be the ability to communicate across those research disciplines.

Give me an example of how a high school student would use the digital Aristotle.

FRIEDLAND: We might envision a smart textbook application. Many scientific textbooks already come with a CD-ROM in them with various materials on it. Think of a CD-ROM that accompanies a scientific textbook that's capable of answering questions. The student would install the application in their PC, and then be able to pose scientific questions and problems. The application would not only answer the questions but break down the detail of how the answer was derived in such a way that the student could understand. This would be a terrific study guide for a high school student.

This idea that it could give you the reasoning for the answer is somewhat novel, right? You could find answers to scientific questions by using a search engine or something like that but if you find the answer your not going to get the reasoning for the answer.

FRIEDLAND: This has a number of novelties above search engine technology. In the case of a search engine you are limited to what answer exists in even a fairly large corpus of documents that may be the entire Internet. And certainly if you do find an answer somewhere out there, it's not going to contain a step-by-step decomposition and explanation of how that answer was derived. Since our technology is capable of reasoning about the science itself, it could come up with answers that don't necessarily appear in any document anywhere.

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During his day, Aristotle was known for deep knowledge about all scientific disciplines, and his ability to teach science. Vulcan, Inc., the venture capital arm of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is funding a long-term project to develop a computer program that might eventually serve as an Aristotle for our times. The goal is to develop computers that can answer scientific questions they've never heard before, and show the reasoning behind their answers. It's called Project Halo, and in one early test, it was able to correctly answer three out of five questions taken from an advanced placement chemistry exam.