- #71
AUMathTutor
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Seeing as how it's the 18th and nothing is better, I can say with certainty that I'm not impressed. The only thing is it seems a bit speedier now, but that may just be my connection.
*sigh*
*sigh*
ExactlySolved, are you a Wolfram employee?
I found this to be rather amusing.
Will the engine to the site ever become a part of Mathematica itself, such that people can set up wolfram-alpha-like natural-language web interfaces to Mathematica scripts or knowledge bases they created themselves?
ExactlySolved said:No, I'm an academic physicist.
ExactlySolved said:The reason that sum^(-1.5) fails the ratio test, which is a bug, is (I'm guessing) that there is mathematica code which compares 1. === 1 and yields false: the use of a machine number exponent leads to the 1. , and the ratio test fails so the sum is reported as diverging. Using n^(-3/2) works, but sum n^(-2.) fails, I'm pretty sure that the comparison of a machine integer and an exact number is the reason.
AUMathTutor said:Rather than a product that can create new knowledge, I see a product that can answer petty questions about existing knowledge.
Anyway, it was clear that Wolfram Research is very Mathematica-centric, and there are *no* chemists in the place. I was working with a physicist who had been at NIST, and they all thought him to be a chemist! He wasn't.
I discussed with Stephen the issue of complexity in chemistry, but the response always seemed to be "we can compute that."
AUMathTutor said:What in the world do you guys mean by "computable knowledge"?
Moonbear said:So, is it really just a web-based version of Mathematica? If so, what's the big deal about it? It's sounding like it might be a useful thing within a very limited area...something for math specialists perhaps?
dx said:The answer to this question was not known to W|A, but it was able to compute it using the information in its database. This is obviously a very unimaginative example, but you can see the potential capability of W|A given how powerful Mathematica is (it can do far more than addition and subtraction, which was all it needed to do in this example), and how much data it has access to.
There's a leeetle bitty "source information" link at the bottom of the page. It's easy to miss and the results are poorly organized (it gives you a list of sources used to build the page, but there's no way to determine what source any specific piece of information came from).Moonbear said:Still, even if it's just good for a limited range of information, it really would be useful to have it tell you what its sources are. How does it decide which sources to use?
There's also a tiny "feedback" form at the bottom of the page. I don't know where the stuff put in the feedback form goes, or if anyone reads it. I haven't used it yet-- I noticed a couple of specific things that needed correcting when I was first messing with it but then forgot what they were before I noticed the feedback form...For example, when it gives a wrong answer to something, there is no way that I see to flag it and tell it that it's wrong and should skip that source and look for another.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090518204959409The legalese says that they claim copyright on each results page and require attribution.
OAQfirst said:
So there does seem to be a lot of potential here, but it all depends on what they do with it and especially how open they ultimately make the technology...
Even if they obtained the information from another source?
AUMathTutor said:This is what happens when you hook up a TI to a database of information.
This is the eternal problem for any wannabe Google competitor. Wolfram Alpha doesn't revolutionize search; at best, it adds a marginally useful new layer on top of it. But Google can easily co-opt such improvements—and suddenly everyone's got a better Google.
But not for students of CS. I've tried several CS-related queries, and apparently Wolfram didn't think that was important enough to include in the first release... ironically enough...
BobG said:I don't think Google could run Mathematica, Maple, and Matlab out of business in any event. I just think they could match whatever the other programs would be willing to put out there for free on the internet.
Coin said:AUMathTutor: The weird thing is those are all things Mathematica itself does. Like it's got foldl and composition and a full set of higher-order functions.
Which leads to another odd thing about Wolfram Alpha-- what happens when you type Mathematica statements into the search box. Sometimes it accepts it and sometimes it doesn't.
Interestingly, if you give Wolfram Alpha the input:
Sort[{2,3,1}]
It does the right thing! But the NLP engine doesn't appear to recognize the word "Sort".
Watching our development process from the inside, I’ve definitely had the feeling in the past few years that we’ve been entering a new regime of growth. That everything we’ve integrated into Mathematica is interacting to let us somehow build almost exponentially more.
And the plot above suggests that something like that is really happening.
But what’s perhaps most striking is that even as the number of functions and the breadth of functionality have been growing so dramatically, we’ve succeeded in maintaining the unity of Mathematica—and of making sure that every piece of the system fits together in a coherent way.
That’s not been easy, of course. It’s the result of our long-term company culture and of a lot of systems that we’ve built up over the course of more than 20 years. (As well as thousands of hours of personal work by me.)
It’s very satisfying, though. Because it means that the things we so carefully built five, ten, twenty years ago are still there today, making possible our new achievements.