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SoCoder -> Link Home -> Useful Apps

 
Scherererer
Created : 16 May 2009
 

Wolfram|Alpha

computational knowledge engine

https://www.wolframalpha.com
Today's Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing...

 

Comments
Saturday, 16 May 2009, 16:42
Jayenkai
 		Oh, is it out, now.
Cool!
I know it's been in Beta for much of this month..

Time to go 'ram myself.
(oh, fook, I hope that phrase doesn't catch on!)
Tuesday, 19 May 2009, 00:44
JL235
 		If you put in Mario, the name of the most successful franchise ever, it fails to appear and instead you get birth and age distribution graphs for the US.

I was having a go with this yesterday and was extremely disappointed. For me, the pages sometimes fail to load because the JavaScript seems to be either extremely slow and expensive (taking multiple minutes to generate content for a page) or has an infinite loop in there. I had to kill FF about 3 or 4 times because it was just locking up. Even then, that is if the search understands what you are searching for, which in most cases it fails to do.

There were lots of things I thought might work (or more might return something loosely relevant) like 'best selling game' or 'who created java'. I thought getting the answers to questions was the point of this? Both fail to be understood by Wolfram|Alpha, where as with Google you can just use "I'm feeling Lucky" to go straight to a relevant page with the correct answer.
Tuesday, 19 May 2009, 01:23
Jayenkai
 		Yeah, It's a bit shit, really, considering all the hype..
Tuesday, 19 May 2009, 02:34
JL235
 		Really, really nice idea and when it's good it is amazing. The problem is that most of the time it isn't good, it's useless. Lots of pretty examples have been given online like 'how many fish in the sea' which it answers with 2 * 10^9 tonnes. Impressive, however it doesn't understand 'how many animals on land'. But even if it did, in reality I wouldn't care.

It's useful, practical questions that I encounter on a day to day basis that I want to put in like 'how many bits does VBA use in integers', something I needed to lookup today (the answer is 16). Most of the answers that Wolfram gives (like the population of New York) could be retrieved by just going to the relevant Wikipedia page (maybe that's how it works?!).

Perhaps in a few years it'll be useful.
Tuesday, 19 May 2009, 13:12
shroom_monk
 		Wolfram will never beat Google, because Google relies on something that Wolfram will never get - the power of the human mind. Thanks to that, Google can find stuff throughout the internet, whereas Wolfram is limited to its databases.

It's a nice idea, but until Wolfram has a database the size of the internet itself (which is always expanding with new information), Google will still beat it. For all the hype, I prefer Google.

Perhaps if Wolfram could harvest new data from the internet, like Google does...