Wolfram Alpha is coming, science geeks get ready!

Originally posted by Republican08
reply to post by stander

 

www.wolframalpha.com...

You can get earthquake data, I know that, not sure on volcanoes, you just have to ask the question right. Give it time.

Forget the number of volcanoes. You never get to it.

It did manage to answer "1 + 1." It sent the query to Matematica and after some five seconds the result 2 showed up.

The Google engine is much "smarter." It does understand the question "How many active volcanoes are in North America?" It just doesn't return the particular answer, but so does Alpha. Alpha refers you to "volcanoes" but then it sends the word to dictionary. I wonder if someone here could manage to squeeze this answer from Alpha and show us how.




[edit on 5/16/2009 by stander]

It looks like the input and its phraseology could be a problem.


[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/6e5c43ebaf5e.jpg[/atsimg]

In this case, Alpha did understand the question, coz it was able to re-phrase it to its own language that guides the search.

Lol, I did a search for the "meaning of life" www.wolframalpha.com...
... it's 42! I was hoping that's what the result would be.

Originally posted by Avarus
Lol, I did a search for the "meaning of life" www.wolframalpha.com...
... it's 42! I was hoping that's what the result would be.

You would expect that "meaning of death" would return a different number than 42, but the result is 42 as well. Check it out. That means, "scientifically speaking," the matter of life and death doesn't have any imperative value. We can write

If LIFE = 42 and DEATH = 42 then LIFE = DEATH.

I guess this conclusion was the base for
encefalus.com...

Originally posted by Tentickles
Let me see what questions will I ask it.

Does the US Government lie to its people?
Are Chemtrails real?
What will happen in 2012?
What causes cancer?
What is the best type of governmental system?
Are ghosts real?
Are vampires real?
Are humans crazy?
What is the answer to life, the universe and everything?
Is fluoride bad for people?

You forgot to ask if aliens were real,lol.


I just tried it out and put in "Do aliens exist?" and it "could not compute". So I tried "Extraterrestrial life" and it crashed,lol. I am NOT impressed, Google is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much better IMO.

I asked it is there any evidence that God exists and it crashed and said it had reached its maximum test load What a massive step forward for humanity would have got a better answer off of my budgie

If you compare wolframalpha to any search engine you are missing the point. It is not a search engine at all. It is more of a solution engine and it is constrained to that which is known and the computable.

I am finding it most useful in my work. It is like having Mathmatica running on a cluster of 10,000 x86 PC cores, hooked into a huge integrated database with some real time feeds from financial data for instance.

It should not be compared to google. Google has some very rudimentary calculating capability but nothing like wolframalpha in my opinion.

It is the first step in a public access A.I. and while it has a rather primitive understanding of natural language it has a dead on accurate mathematical solution capability.


[edit on 5/18/2009 by UFOTECH]

I used it to see if there were any notable news events on the day I was born..turns out nothing interesting happened....One of these days I will google myself and find out that I am an interesting person....hopefully it won't be a mug shot on thesmokinggun.com

i just got turned on to this site, last week.

Ho. Lee. Sh|t!

And, now.... there IS an iPhone app for it! Goodbye, rest of the afternoon!