Have you gotten it to do anything interesting? I played with it a week or so ago and never found a query that gave useful results.
I gather that they're trying to put a natural language query frontend over the content such as MathWorld and PhysicsWorld that Wolfram has been hosting, along with some subset of Mathematica functionality. But even restricting my queries to math and physics topics from the combustion work that I'm doing, I didn't get anything helpful.
I haven't played that much, so no, nothing useful at this point. I did type in "toyota gm" and got presented with a nice comparison. I found the results for "ellsworth and "michael" enlightening.
If you'd like to hear Steven Wolfram explain what his hopes for Alpha are (not that *I* understand it), listen to the the last 35 minutes of this 56MB MP3 podcast starting at 1:26:45:
I haven't listened to that podcast yet, but I have to mention that I had several opportunities to sit around and chat with Steven one year at the SIGGRAPH conference--whichever year it was that Mathematica made its premiere. (We were chasing the same girl. He offered her a job and I couldn't match that offer.)
One evening over beer he gave me a 10 or 15 minute introduction to catastrophe theory. He was personable and well-spoken, and very matter-of-fact and "all it is really is..." about it. I came away with at least a vague notion of what he was talking about!
But Wolfram Alpha "isn't sure what to do with your input" if you query on "catastrophe theory." Wikipedia, on the other hand, does a fine job with the topic.
I haven't really found anything useful on Wolfram|Alpha, but I did find a couple of interesting bits: 1) Our home phone is a prime number; 2) There might be 2,396 people alive today in the U.S. with my given name, ranking 990th (surprisingly high, to me).
5 comments:
Have you gotten it to do anything interesting? I played with it a week or so ago and never found a query that gave useful results.
I gather that they're trying to put a natural language query frontend over the content such as MathWorld and PhysicsWorld that Wolfram has been hosting, along with some subset of Mathematica functionality. But even restricting my queries to math and physics topics from the combustion work that I'm doing, I didn't get anything helpful.
Why it's still in alpha, I suppose.
I haven't played that much, so no, nothing useful at this point. I did type in "toyota gm" and got presented with a nice comparison. I found the results for "ellsworth and "michael" enlightening.
If you'd like to hear Steven Wolfram explain what his hopes for Alpha are (not that *I* understand it), listen to the the last 35 minutes of this 56MB MP3 podcast starting at 1:26:45:
http://tinyurl.com/p9qwrh
I haven't listened to that podcast yet, but I have to mention that I had several opportunities to sit around and chat with Steven one year at the SIGGRAPH conference--whichever year it was that Mathematica made its premiere. (We were chasing the same girl. He offered her a job and I couldn't match that offer.)
One evening over beer he gave me a 10 or 15 minute introduction to catastrophe theory. He was personable and well-spoken, and very matter-of-fact and "all it is really is..." about it. I came away with at least a vague notion of what he was talking about!
But Wolfram Alpha "isn't sure what to do with your input" if you query on "catastrophe theory." Wikipedia, on the other hand, does a fine job with the topic.
I haven't really found anything useful on Wolfram|Alpha, but I did find a couple of interesting bits: 1) Our home phone is a prime number; 2) There might be 2,396 people alive today in the U.S. with my given name, ranking 990th (surprisingly high, to me).
Oh - the most interesting thing about given names is the US history graphs. Try yours.
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