# Wolfram Alpha - Thoughts?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [May 5, 2009, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458 "2009-05-05T21:14:54Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Omniscient](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omniscient)
#### Post date: [May 5, 2009, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/1 "2009-05-05T21:14:54Z")
Has anyone been keeping tabs on the impending release of the new “search engine” [Wolfram Alpha](http://www.wolframalpha.com/)?
Here’s a [decent article](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/wolfram-alpha-computes-answers-to-factual-questions-this-is-going-to-be-big/) that summarizes what it is and how it will work.
Here’s a [CNET discussion](http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10233763-2.html) of the product and it’s viability.
Here’s a [YouTube Video](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYhLsQPHNas) with it’s inventor demonstrating it at a seminar.
Has anyone been following along? It’s not really a web search engine in the traditional sense and it’s recent press that it’s a Google killer seems way off. At least as of right now, this product doesn’t appear to fill the same need. It looks like it will provide information much more concisely on very specific topics that surpasses anything that Wiki or Google would ever dream of, but it doesn’t immediately have much use for non-factual stuff. I’ll be interested to see how it handles document searches and attempts to find technical support type queries, at this point that seems like something it won’t do at all.
In any case, I have a strong feeling that it will become a pretty common reference on the Dope, especially in GQ, in the very near future so it might be time to start familiarizing ourselves with it.
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### Author:  [@Simplicio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Simplicio)
#### Post date: [May 5, 2009, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/2 "2009-05-05T21:39:54Z")
I dunno. There’s a good amount of value in being able to tell where answers to questions come from. Even in wikipedia, facts are (in theory) cited. But this sounds like it will just troll some vast internal database that the user has no direct access to. So if it tells me the average speed of an African Swallow, I don’t have any way of telling where that information came from.
Should be fun to play around with for a few hours though.
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### Author:  [@Omniscient](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omniscient)
#### Post date: [May 6, 2009, 9:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/3 "2009-05-06T09:34:13Z")
One reply? Man, the Dope used to be SO much geekier back in the day.
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### Author:  [@Happy\_Poster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Happy_Poster)
#### Post date: [May 6, 2009, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/4 "2009-05-06T19:11:18Z")
I will be impressed if it can design a better version of itself.
Then we may have that much vaunted technological singularity.
Until then, meh.
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### Author:  [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)
#### Post date: [May 7, 2009, 4:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/5 "2009-05-07T04:13:31Z")
Dunno, it seems easy enough to just type the keyword into Wikipedia and then scan the webpage.
That it can, perhaps, do complex physics equations (if it can) could theoretically be useful, but is really only useful to college students who don’t want to have to figure it out themselves. Anyone who does physics for a living, I suspect already has tools to help them along.
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### Author:  [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)
#### Post date: [May 7, 2009, 6:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/6 "2009-05-07T06:05:16Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#):
>
> That it can, perhaps, do complex physics equations (if it can) could theoretically be useful, but is really only useful to college students who don’t want to have to figure it out themselves.
From the Alpha Blog:
> [@](#):
>
> The thing that truly sets Wolfram|Alpha apart is that it is able to do sophisticated computations for you, both pure computations involving numbers or formulas you enter, and computations applied automatically to data called up from its repositories.
> Why does computation matter? Because computation is what turns generic information into specific answers.
> To give an amusing example, every school child has at one time or another written a report on the moon, and they probably included the wrong figure for how far the moon is from the earth. Why wrong? Because the distance from the earth to the moon is not constant: it changes by as much as a mile a minute. If you ask Wolfram|Alpha the distance to the moon, it tells you not only the conventionally quoted average distance, but also the actual distance right now, which can at times be well over ten thousand miles off the average.
In a review that was linked to on Slashdot recently, it was pointed out that the query “10 pounds kilograms” returns 4.536 kg^2. Some described the answer as “unhelpful”, but what’s interesting is that it’s actually a correct interpretation of the query as a statement, and not just unrelated keywords. I think the quality of the query parser is one of the things that will decide Alpha’s success.
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### Author:  [@Nicolas\_Bourbaki](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nicolas_Bourbaki)
#### Post date: [May 7, 2009, 6:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/7 "2009-05-07T06:42:47Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#):
>
> Dunno, it seems easy enough to just type the keyword into Wikipedia and then scan the webpage.
>
> That it can, perhaps, do complex physics equations (if it can) could theoretically be useful, but is really only useful to college students who don’t want to have to figure it out themselves. Anyone who does physics for a living, I suspect already has tools to help them along.
Wikipedia has a graph of the average temperature of Lexington, MA over the past ten years?
On that note, thank you for the Youtube video. All I had read about this was the Spivack article (and the tech blogs that copypasted it), and that guy hyped this more than the second coming of Christ, but said nothing about its actual capabilities beyond “it knows where Timbuktu is”. It looks likes it searches for statistics on what you type in and sorts them intelligently, but drawing from a huge freekin’ database. It won’t be the next printing press, but it looks like it can do things Wikipedia and Google can’t.
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### Author:  [@threemae](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/threemae)
#### Post date: [May 7, 2009, 6:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/8 "2009-05-07T06:56:01Z")
I think that Google’s position is more vulnerable than most realize. For a large number of my searches I’m frustrated by the number of responses spat up by sites which “repackage” information without much added utility or even more cynically just provide a list of links “related” to my search rather than actual sites containing the information I’m seeking.
Given that Google hasn’t been able to effectively tamp-down this phenomena in-spite of its extensive computer-science resources, I’m not so naive as to believe the problem is easily soluble, but let’s just say there’s a large gap between the current incarnation of Google and the “perfect” search engine that always gives me the information I want from a reputable source with a minimal amount of effort.
Within this gap lies room for disruptive new market players. Obviously, it won’t be easy to develop that sort of thing, but from what I saw on the YouTube video I think this is pretty impressive and I certainly intend to check it out when it exits the private beta.
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### Author:  [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)
#### Post date: [May 7, 2009, 9:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/9 "2009-05-07T09:19:22Z")
Well, google does do “simpler” calculations, too. For example, “10 pounds in kilograms” returns
> [@](#):
>
> 10 pounds = 4.5359237 kilograms
which seems to be the same answer given by the new search engine.
Now that I think about it, there’s no way this could ever become a Google killer, anyways. If it ever became even remotely as popular, Google would buy it up just like they did YouTube et al. (Especially since they already have a similar but inferior service ala Google Video)
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### Author:  [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)
#### Post date: [May 7, 2009, 9:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/10 "2009-05-07T09:38:04Z")
> [@BigT](#):
>
> Well, google does do “simpler” calculations, too. For example, “10 pounds in kilograms” returns which seems to be the same answer given by the new search engine.
Yeah, but does it do "temperature in Vientiane \* GDP of Mozambique / population of Sioux City IA " and plot it on a graph? That’s what Alpha’s supposed to do.
From the demo video, it’s clear that this aims to be a tool for academic types rather than the general public, similarly to MathWorld.
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### Author:  [@friedo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/friedo)
#### Post date: [May 7, 2009, 10:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/11 "2009-05-07T10:19:27Z")
MathWorld is cool. It makes me wish I actually knew math.
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### Author:  [@tim314](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tim314)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2009, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/12 "2009-05-17T02:08:55Z")
Q: Estimated velocity of an unladen swallow
A:
[Assuming estimated average cruising airspeed of an unladen African swallow | Use European Swallow instead]
There is unfortunately insufficient data to estimate the velocity of an African Swallow (even if you specified which of the 47 species of swallow found in Africa you meant
Use European Swallow instead:
Result:
25 mph (miles per hour)
Unit conversions:
40 km/h (kilometers per hour)
21 knots
11 m/s (meters per second)
660 m/min (meters per minute)
0.66 km/min (kilometers per minute)
950 km/day (kilometers per day)
950 000 m/day (meters per day)
0.41 mi/min (miles per minute)
590 miles per day
36 ft/s (feet per second)
* * *
Q: answer to life, the universe, and everything
A: 42
–
Q: How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
A: A woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
–
Q: luminosity of the Sun in dietary calories per zeptosecond
A: 91.9 Cal/zs
–
Q: speed of light / (miles / (half-life of ununoctium))
A: 900
–
Q: fish in the sea
A:
Input interpretation:
estimate of total ocean fish biomass
Result:
2x10^9 metric tons
Unit conversions:
~~ 2 Gt (metric gigatons)
~~ 4x10^12 lb (pounds)
~~ 2x10^12 kg (kilograms)
~~ 2x10^15 grams
Comparisons:
~~( 0.02~~ 1/40 ) x total biomass on Earth (~~ 8x10^13 kg )
~~( 0.2~~ 1/5 ) x total mass of gold in the oceans (~~ 1x10^16 g )
~~0.5 x world oil production mass in 2004 (~~ 4.15x10^12 kg )
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### Author:  [@tim314](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tim314)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2009, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/13 "2009-05-17T02:30:40Z")
Q: Who wrote the book of love?
A: Alan Brown
–
Q: How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?
A: The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
–
Q: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
A: Angels are pure intelligences, not material, but limited, so that they have location in space, but not extension. Therefore, an infinity of angels can be located on the head of a pin.
–
Q: Is e^pi irrational?
A: True
–
Q: Is my wife irrational?
A: WolframAlpha is not sure what to do with your input.
So I guess it doesn’t know everything.
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### Author:  [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2009, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/14 "2009-05-17T03:33:30Z")
> [@jovan](#):
>
> Yeah, but does it do "temperature in Vientiane \* GDP of Mozambique / population of Sioux City IA " and plot it on a graph? That’s what Alpha’s supposed to do.
Apparently, the formula above doesn’t work. On the other hand, “GDP of Mozambique / population of Sioux City IA” does provide the answer I was looking for.
> **[GDP of Mozambique / population of sioux city - Wolfram|Alpha](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=GDP+of+Mozambique+%2F+population+of+sioux+city)**
>
> Wolfram|Alpha brings expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels.
Now, what’s really interesting is that the result page has a link to search the web, which points to… Google. Even more interesting, the first Google hit is to my own post in this thread! Apparently, no one else cares about comparing Mozambique and Sioux City.
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### Author:  [@Strinka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Strinka)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2009, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/15 "2009-05-17T03:58:06Z")
> [@BigT](#):
>
> Well, google does do “simpler” calculations, too. For example, “10 pounds in kilograms” returns which seems to be the same answer given by the new search engine.
Yeah, Google can do arithmetic and unit conversions, but this can do much more than that. Google can’t [integrate](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=integrate+x%5E2+sin(x)).
[Here](http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html)’s a video going over many of the things Wolfram Alpha can do.
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### Author:  [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)
#### Post date: [May 18, 2009, 2:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/16 "2009-05-18T14:16:12Z")
I’m going for a job in Inverness so I plugged in ‘rental accommodation in Inverness’ and got the message that it didn’t know what do. I also tried asking it about homes to rent in New York, with identical results. So it’s not a data problem.
Could this be Cuil again?
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### Author:  [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)
#### Post date: [May 18, 2009, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/17 "2009-05-18T15:22:52Z")
It’s a secret plot by [this organization](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3144/2764252165_399b967c46_o.jpg) for world domination.
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### Author:  [@Nicolas\_Bourbaki](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nicolas_Bourbaki)
#### Post date: [May 18, 2009, 8:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/18 "2009-05-18T20:20:28Z")
> [@Quartz](#):
>
> I’m going for a job in Inverness so I plugged in ‘rental accommodation in Inverness’ and got the message that it didn’t know what do. I also tried asking it about homes to rent in New York, with identical results. So it’s not a data problem.
>
> Could this be Cuil again?
😕 No one ever _claimed_ it could find you housing. The website has an explicit [listing](http://www51.wolframalpha.com/examples/) of what it can do, and none of those are “search Craigslist for you and return the exact same results it would”. It’s meant to be an easy-to-access database for a variety of scientific topics, not a faff-about-online search engine. If you need one of those, I hear a thing called ‘google’ is pretty good.
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### Author:  [@Fuzzy\_Dunlop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fuzzy_Dunlop)
#### Post date: [May 18, 2009, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/19 "2009-05-18T20:28:57Z")
> [@tim314](#):
>
> So I guess it doesn’t know everything.
Somebody should ask it “14 K of G in a F P D” just in case it knows.
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### Author:  [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)
#### Post date: [May 18, 2009, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wolfram-alpha-thoughts/495458/20 "2009-05-18T21:52:37Z")
> [@Nicolas\_Bourbaki](#):
>
> 😕 No one ever _claimed_ it could find you housing. The website has an explicit [listing](http://www51.wolframalpha.com/examples/) of what it can do, and none of those are “search Craigslist for you and return the exact same results it would”. It’s meant to be an easy-to-access database for a variety of scientific topics, not a faff-about-online search engine. If you need one of those, I hear a thing called ‘google’ is pretty good.
I was hoping it would return things like typical rents by area and by property size. All available from the website of lettings agents. To aggregate them and analyse them would be very useful.
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