Wolfram Alpha

[scandal 951]

Anybody using Wolfram Alpha? This is the new "calculation engine / search tool" that was brought online recently. I messed around with it a bit tonight. I tried to see what it would give for some of the topics I've posted on VJ about, so I tried things like "California Prop 13", "California Property taxes" , "US cities murder rates", etc. It was not very impressive. It gave almost no useful information. For now, I'm sticking to Google.

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http://www.wolframalpha.com/about.html

Goals

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

I check it out last weekend. I'm keeping this on my radar for sure.

It's good for science stuff.... throw in plutonium 239 and see what it does.

Edited May 25, 2009 by LuckyStrike

[Bobby+Umit 161]

Do a search on the word "dumb"

[Niels Bohr 72]

Besides scientific applications, Wolfram Alpha is also good for analyzing stocks which I use it for primarily. Any other scientific analysis is pretty much reliant on MATLAB for me.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

I haven't heard of that one, but Yahoo has a search engine it is trying to sneak in when you install some programs on your computer, and that search engine just plain sucks.

[Saddle Bronc 124]

I haven't heard of that one, but Yahoo has a search engine it is trying to sneak in when you install some programs on your computer, and that search engine just plain sucks.

I've experienced this whenever Firefox talks of updates--almost invariably one of the "updates" is the Yahoo search bar (since I never installed it--Firefox already has Google-bar and I don't want a browser that's 98% search-bars and 2% viewable window)