Borek said:
D from chemistry if you ask me
Is this a curved grading system, and if so then which online computational engine do you grant an A grade to for chemistry?
"So it's a fancy, online calculator?"
Sure, in the sense that our bodies are just an animated seres of salty water bags, or in the sense that most vocations consist of altering the position of matter on the surface of the Earth --- the point is that questions like these are 'baited' or 'loaded.'
What service, free or otherwise, is closer to achieving the objective of W|A ? Even if it is just a 'fancy, online calculator', is there any other online caculator that is more fancy, or that has more potential to achieve the ambitious goals of W|A ?
People who need the answers to questions like "what's the solution to the y'' + y' = sin(x)" will either (a) know how to do it by hand, (b) know how to write a program in any language to get a numerical answer, or (c) have access to the *real* mathematica, or some other similar package, that will *tell them the answer*. So the people who would use it don't need it, and the people who wouldn't use it don't want it.
Last night I needed to solve a transcendental algebraic equation to find the critical point of an ising-type model, but my Mathematica kernels were busy running a monte caro sim, so I used W|A to compute the answer. Similarly, W|A is availible on the iphone and other (public) computers I may find myself using that don't have Mathematica. Furthermore, W|A automates various things that would take a few steps of writing in Mathematica, so it is quickly becoming my choice for quick calculations.
If I needed an integration, I went and asked it. Beautiful. They could have added ~100 other pages like that, for a slew of different things, and I would have been immeasurably more impressed.
Of coure W|A does all the integrals that th integrator did, and now it will also do school algebra and derivatives with steps shown. As for ~100 pages like that, perhaps you should look at the examples:
http://www64.wolframalpha.com/examples/
It sounds like the degree to which you are impressed has to do with your pre-expectations, but why not judge the service in comparison to what similar services exist right now?
Based on the responses in this thread, the biggest failure of W|A so far is to communicate properly what the intention of the system is, and since it is targeted to a wide audience that has very minimal experience in giving instructions to a computer, to teach them that the way you learn such things is by studying examples. Spend some time with the examples to learn what W|A can do, and how to ask it to ask it to do those things, and then generalize the examples to the cases that you are interested in. Admittedly, most people are unlikely to ever do this, same story as with Mathematica, but this product is still a step forward above anything else that is currently out there --- there was a youthful age at which Mathematica would have been too difficult for me but W|A could teach me lots.
To call the most ambitious computational knowledge engine of all time 'totally useless' is an exaggeration: look at the example page, look at all the things it can do. Most things in life are imperfect in an enormous number of ways: pointing these out is not as interesting as focusing on things that are good, that do represent progress and improvement.
There's a difference between being a cynic and pointing out obvious flaws with a system. I know it's still early, and that there's a lot of room for improvement, but if people like the ones who are saying I have high expectations ran the world, nothing would ever get any better.
Wow, we see each other's viewpoints with irony. I am certainly not saying that W|A has accomplished its goal, and in fact I identify with the people at Wolfram Research who are working non-stop to add improvements. As I see it, Google' marketing people are better at catering to this type of critic, the way that they stick beta tags on everything (don't attack our product, it's just a beta). When your product is improving exponentially, as Mathematica is, life is too short for beta releases --- when M7 was released there were already teams working on M8 and M9: as Mathematica improves it opens new possibilities that take time to develop, but then these improvements herald new improvements and so on (the hallmark of exp growth) and so you have to periodically release something because the product is never done. Of course, I don't mean things like minor bug fixes, but enormous new families of features.
I wonder how many people who are complaining about W|A have done much File I/O with a language like C : those people know that just being able to import data from all the hundreds of different file formats into the appropriate C data structures is a beyond daunting task. Then to organize all of this heterogeneous data into a database that can be accessed with simple one-line commands!
WA is very very disappointing. It understands very little. So much so, that I expect google will have no trouble doing way better. The product was released too early.
Look at the example page I linked, before saying 'it understands very little.' Also, think about the organizational issues involved, and realize that Google is at least 20 years + 1 super-genius behind Wolfram Inc. Super-genius Wolfram spent 10,000 hours doing design reviews for Mathematica 6 alone! Design reviews are not about obscure algorithms, they are about organization and long term vision. Through version 5, the estimated effort that had gone into Mathematica is over 1000 man-years, much of which comes from a large number of ex-soviet Mathematicians in the early 1990s. Almost no one truly appreciates Mathematica, but the thousands of us who do realize that it is totally in a class of its own amongst software. I am reminded of what Haydn said of Mozart:
"If only I could impress Mozart's inimitable works on the soul of every friend of music, and the souls of high personages in particular, as deeply, with the same musical understanding and with the same deep feeling, as I understand and feel them, the nations would vie with each other to possesses such a jewel."
and so to for Mathematica, and in time, so to for Wolfram|Alpha.
I think the challange will be how to best ask a question.
