Wolfram Alpha

[Haech]

I can't believe no one here is talking about it. what do you guys think?

[Theory5]

Originally Posted by Haech

I can't believe no one here is talking about it. what do you guys think?

Perhaps you could explain a little more about Wolfram Alpha and what it does.
Is this What you are talking about?

[CraigD]

Being a big fan of Stephen Wolfram (he’s at or close to the top of my “people I wish I was” list), I’ve been looking forward to wolframalpha, or practically any other tool he comes up with.

That said, I see the point of critics who’ve said it could have used a lot more work before a wide public release. Capacity and availability appears to have been poorly planned, as much of the weekend, I got “unavailable – no connections available” from it. As best I can tell, it works pretty well if you’re willing to work with it, and educate yourself in its various ways of replying, which are sometimes awesomely clear, other times pretty much straight Mathematica, and frequently bizarre guesses at what you were trying to ask.

A couple examples I tried were “solve V = 4*pi/3*((r+d)^3 -r^3) for d”, how thick a spherical shell of a given outer radius must be to have a given volume, which I’d just solved myself in about 15 minutes using old-fashioned human algebra. It took a few seconds, and (clicking on “show steps”), is as clearly explained as by a good teacher. Cranking it up 4 dimensions to a 7-sphere, “solve V = 2*pi/315*((r+d)^7 -r^7) for d” returns output saying, to people who know Mathematica “use a numeric approximation”, which is fine if you know Mathematica and that there’re no general solutions to degree 7 polynomials, but pretty opaque if you don’t. Slip up slightly in your notation, and you’ll get weird results, ie: “solve V = k((r+d)^7 -r^7) for d”.

Try “Schwarzschild radius”, and it give you an equation and a nifty calculator to input masses into, but no handy reference of common masses to try – nice, but not superb.

It responds neatly to a simple “how are you?”, but lacks the pre-programmed pith of the ca 2000 “Jeeves” version of ask.com, which would reply to question like “are you gay?” with “none of your business”, “I prefer the term ‘jovial’”, or “sometimes silence is the best answer”.

In short, wolframalpha show promise, and I’d be fascinated to know how it’s working, but I don’t think in its present form it’ll steal much traffic from google, hyperphysics, or wikikpedia.

[Theory5]

I thought it is a pretty neat program. It calculates the trajectory of satillites and tells you their position, does algebra, and if you ask it the answer to life it answers '42' :-)
It seems like its always being added to, from what I determined when it didnt know about a certain catagory it asked if I was interested in it.
I dont think its supposed to steal traffic from google or anyone, it says that it is not a search engine, it calculates answers with algorithims and such, instead of finding websites.

[Mercedes Benzene]

I am a HUGE fan of WolframAlpha. For anyone who deals with math or science on a regular basis, it's really a miraculous tool. When I'm not *actually* using it, I sometimes type in random equations in different formats and look at all the cool data/graphs that it gives.

Unfortunately, I'm often disappointed by its limitations. I feel like it's not totally up to date on some of its information, and I'm also disappointed by some of the types of information that engine doesn't report.
Overall though, it's a winner.