Wolfram Alpha - The Computational Knowledge Engine

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Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.
-- Samuel Johnson

What the deuce is this?
Billing itself as an 'answer engine' from the creator of Mathematica and, whether you like it or not, the author of A New Kind of Science, Wolfram Alpha starts to launch tonight.

Answer engine? So it's like Google?
Not really. It's not crawling the web, just a very large database of carefully arranged information. It's difficult to explain succinctly, but the screencast does a relatively good job of demonstrating the sort of things that are possible that would clearly be difficult to pull of as easily with Google.

When can I start playing?
From 8pm EDT this evening (the 15th), they're going to start switching things on and trying not to collapse under the inevitable load. They will be broadcasting via justin.tv; you can find the feed here on the Wolfram Alpha site, and presumably also on the justin.tv site itself once it gets going.

The official launch is Monday - they hope to have fixed everything by then to the extent that it's running smoothly. You'll be able to find updates at the blog too.

The geek in me is excited by the possibilities, but it all depends on how effortless it really is to use and how hard it is to catch out - I rather suspect the screencast in particular is using very carefully chosen queries. At the very least, it'll be a free web-accessable Mathematica-lite - which is definitely worth drawing attention to.

Iconoclysm

That screencast is pretty fucking astonishing. I now want to have Wolfram Alpha linked to my brain so I can annoy people at parties.

Roll on launch time I'm going to be sucking down facts like ... uhh some sort of fact sucker.

Joe Chemo

Ok so this is rather awesome. Putting in a random AGTCGTGACT found exact matches in the human genome. Too bad they dont' have other genomes.

Oh god particle physics.

Arhagaghh nerdgasm.

Artreus

If this pulls off what the video was doing, I will be impressed and this looks fucking awesome. I am still somewhat incredulous though. Seems like something you would need to pay for or something.

edit: oh apparently you can use it right now and it is pretty neat

Surfpossum

Hey, it gives you the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

What a surprise.

zeeny

I want to play with this, but the site is getting ass raped, it seems.

Impersonator

This is crazy. I like it.

edit: Awesome! You can add a Wolfram Alpha accelerator to Internet Explorer 8!

Obs

How do we know the Knowledge will be accurate

Impersonator

For starters, it's totally unrelated to you...

Obs

Oh that was uncalled for.

Delete that post.

Joe Chemo

It's certainly far from comprehensive, but I think over time this will shape up to be a really nice resource. It already is, for certain straightforward fact-finding applications.

But it has big gaps. Like, say, automobiles.

lazerbeard

its pretty fun to mess around with if you can get on, sometimes I have trouble thinking of the right syntax for more complicated things, (for instance I tried writing a matrix like [1,0;0,1] and it didn't recognize it) but obviously it doesn't do what mathematica can, I like the comparisons and unit conversions, those can be fun.

Fats

Obs wrote: »

How do we know the Knowledge will be accurate

It lists sources down at the bottom.

Clipse

Like nearly everything Wolfram produces this is mostly disappointing with a few positives. If I want the derivative or integral or even various representations of a function, it works pretty well both at interpreting natural language and at reading math input. Sort of like Mathematica with informal input. But if I search for the martingale convergence theorems it comes up with nothing -- wikipedia and planetmath easily give me formal statements of them. Similarly with even very basic theorems like the intermediate value theorem. The knowledge database seems very lacking, to say the least.

Puddlesworth

lazerbeard wrote: »

its pretty fun to mess around with if you can get on, sometimes I have trouble thinking of the right syntax for more complicated things, (for instance I tried writing a matrix like [1,0;0,1] and it didn't recognize it) but obviously it doesn't do what mathematica can, I like the comparisons and unit conversions, those can be fun.

Mathematica would do it {{1,0},{0,1}} although i'm much more use to the matlab way too.

Taranis

Bahahaha it says the meaning of life is 42!

Artreus

Taranis wrote: »

Bahahaha it says the meaning of life is 42!

Yes, somebody else already mentioned this.

Joe Chemo

It also has the airspeed of an unladen european swallow.

Alas, it does not have the airspeed of an unladen african swallow.

Treeloot

I really like Wolfram Alpha so far. This thing could be a godsend for stats assignments once they beef up their database.

GrimReaper

Pretty weird how it outputs the answers as images that when clicked allow copyable text. I guess that's for the more complex answers that can't be output as just some text.

Obs

Cool it answers the question of how much wood a wood chuck would chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood.

GrimReaper

Obs wrote: »

Cool it answers the question of how much wood a wood chuck would chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood.

Yeah, but it doesn't know the question to the answer of life, the universe and everything. For shame Wolfram, for shame.

EDIT: Aha, if you format like this. Then it does give you the right question, thwarted!

EDIT2: Well, not the right question if we go by HHGTTG.

Krikee

This site is amazing.

Pajama Sam

http://www89.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=geogravity+in+seattle

o_O

Smasher

Are you surprised they have that information or that it isn't straight down? If it's the latter keep in mind the Earth isn't a perfect sphere, but rather an ellipsoid that's several dozen miles wider than it is tall due to the Earth's rotation.

JohnDoe

This is pretty cool - needs more servers though.

Smurph

Yeah it's pretty cool but needs some work. I asked it what the largest bird was, and it said the Ostrich. Then I asked what the largest flying bird was and it was all WTF?

Joe Chemo

Well of course. It's much too smart to mention albatrosses out loud and risk the wrath of our avian overlor

Newres

It does not know the names of god so I guess we are safe.... for now.

Pretty cool otherwise, will check it out more in depth when I have more time.

Unknown

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Joe Chemo

This is awesome.

cram

Joe Chemo wrote: »

This is awesome.

Ahhaha serving size 5.9742x10^24 kg, total fat 7.2x10^20 metric tons.

It's some horrible mishmash of data aggregator and calculator. You do have to be somewhat specific in how you phrase questions, presumably this will get better.