Ask me anything: the Wolfram Alpha project

I sort of live at http://www.wolframalpha.com

There's been a lot of hype about this. At the moment, it's good on quickly presenting data on a narrowish range of subjects but you soon come up against its limitations.

Still playing with it. I like the Soundex thing - could be handy for my job.

"Is sort of live". I am not the Wolfram Alpha project.

13,900 people speak anal

this is what I've discovered

thank you wA

was hoping for better results
http://img.skitch.com/20090517-bkk842pwgtfcqsg24tnwkix2iu.jpg

It doesn't know either how babby is formed or how web is shot. I'm utterly dissapointed.

Also bad at "chartreuse cocktails", "Ain department, France" and "what is the best techno album?". Did very well at "derivative of x^3 sin x" though.

Didn't have a clue what the most boring band in the world is.

did not know waht it is made

did know about rain in spain

It can do calculus! Binomial expansion, Trigonometric equations, all sorts. And it shows you the solutions step by step and lovingly formatted.

This has huge implications for maths education if nothing else. Students will be able to copy and paste their way through homework assignments as easily as if i'd asked them to summarise world war 2!

totally tru, other applications a bit more opaque just now

Ha, hopefully this gives math instructors incentive to weigh showing the work even more heavily, as I truly excel at that portion but the answer part is a little less easy for me. Many a night I have written a short novel in math form and never came up with the ending.

insert donald barthelme joke here

Wolfram Alpha gives you all the "working out" too! just click "show steps" next to the solutions.

WOLFMAN ALFALFA

WOLFMAN, ASK HER

Nice use for Wolfram Alpha

Enter your ingredients and weights/meaures an get the nutritional info.

http://www71.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2F8+pound+lentils+%2B+2+oz+potatoes+%2B+20g+spinach+%2B+2%2F3+tbsp+olive+oil

oops:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2123/3542296659_dd6968e297.jpg

biggest little town.

this thing kind of sucks imo

All very nice, but will it find you pron?

Find me some pron

Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/5231/2gi.tif

This thing is like aspie google

more autistic

Dude invented Mathematica, of course it can do calculus. From what little I have caught about this though, he apparently thinks that some kind of pattern-matching style of "expert system" AI in the 1980s style will be the thing to solve the natural-language-to-computer problem. I remain skeptical.

Bayes, probabilistics, cutting-edge machine learning, computational power, corpora: these seem like better keys than this to me, so Google remain faves in my book. Must admit I haven't paid real attention to the W|A project apart from the claims though.

The natural-language-to-computer thing is not really the focus of what it's about, though.

There's a long, interesting interview with him tacked on to end of this edition of Leo Laporte's This Week In Tech:

http://twit.tv/195

Worth listening to.

I looked at it yesterday and did not really understand it.

idgi

this guys ego is hilarious and astounding. i expect his emperor vibes are a consequence of operating as a 'CEO & entrepeneur' rather than an institutions man. that said, once you numb to his heavy shelling grandeur the thinking he's done with complex systems & simple rules is kind of awesome.

http://www.itsnature.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/cone-snail1.jpg
http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lcczwwzu9w1qdu6dfo1_500.jpg

ok actua-lost my shit to '2 cup girls' upthread

I have had a go at trying to get useful data out of the Wolfram Alpha search engine. It is still completely useless.

i love it for exactly this reason

i asked it what "geir hongro" is, it doesn't know either :(

snigger: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=hi+dere+waht+is+it+made%3F

Now does Facebook analytics. I have more female friends than male ones!

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/08/wolframalpha-personal-analytics-for-facebook/

For some reason I find it rather satisfying to compare the lifespans of famous people through this thing. Like, uh
http://www.wolframalpha.com/share/img?i=d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427erkk1lee84i&f=HBQTQYZYGY4TOMZYHEYDOYJZMUYDCMZZG5STKMLDMIYGEMRXMRSQaaaa

http://www.wolframalpha.com/share/img?i=d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427emc670injlq&f=HBQTQYZYGY4TSMZYHEYDQNRRGUYDCMZZG5STMNBSGZRWCMRYGEYQaaaa

(no no, I'm not going to keep posting this stuff)

Now does Facebook analytics. I have more female friends than male ones!

The friend network clusters thing is pretty amazing. I mean, I guess it works in a pretty simple way but it's still kind of fascinating how it can separate out all of the different spheres of your life.

holy shit those friend cluster things are insane

everything wk said

my xmas assignment is to write a java program that parses replies from this thing fyi

Cool -- nice to get more or less legitimate assignments.

Meanwhile, "how is babby formed" now gives the extremely helpful response "from their mothers."
"How do I shot web?" gives "I dunno lol."

Progress!

ha we can hope that these are on the list of questions to be posed in the testing stage

Apparently he's solved physics

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/

is this guy credible or do people look at him askance? I am flipping through a New Kind Of Science and not having studied science it all sounds impressive but it has an aire of hand-waveyness about it that makes me think he's not as smart as he says he is.

I work in one of the fields in which Wolfram has done some things and I'd say he's credible, but people don't pay him the kind of attention that he thinks he warrants. To get attention you need to be a part of "the community"; this guy is by contrast primarily a salesman. There's too much else to pay attention to: the stuff your closer colleagues are making, the stuff you have to read (because you're a referee or on a hiring or tenure committee or because it's by your grad students). And this guy, being outside the academic world, doesn't do his share of normal academic responsibilities (journal editing, refereeing, e.g.) so that's another reason to give your very scarce attention to other things. If it's "really" important it'll get attention eventually.

About a decade ago I had an hourlong conversation with him at a party in NYC, where we were both speakers at the same conference. He was not a jerk or particularly overbearing compared with the usual people I spend time with in the community, and I enjoyed the conversation very much. He showed me a prototype of mathematica on his iPad (that he said his son had written!) but I guess this never got released and that the alpha app/website was its replacement.