6 ms·

Wolfram Alpha: ‘People Just Need What We Are Doing’

71 points by spottiness 15y ago

hugh3 15y ago
I like Wolfram Alpha, but despite being way towards the top of the "people most likely to find a use for Wolfram Alpha" list, I've only found a use for Wolfram Alpha a couple of times. I use Google Calculator all the freaking time, and only resort to Wolfram Alpha on the odd occasion that Google Calculator fails me. Does anyone use it regularly?
- neutronicus 15y ago
  I use it for unit conversions sometimes, but its parser and its understanding of Gaussian electromagnetic units leave a lot to be desired. It's also good for a quick Taylor series when I don't feel like firing up Sage.
- ColinWright 15y ago
  I used it to create the graphs and compute the solutions for my recent blog post: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/AnOddityInTennis.html?HN http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/AnOddityInTennis.html?HN I found it really useful to have a facility on-line that let me do those calculations and draw those graphs. I'm interested - what would you use instead?
  - btcoal 15y ago
    R
    - ColinWright 15y ago
      But that's not an on-line solution. I have half a dozen desktop solutions. I don't (yet) use R, although it's on my "To Do" list for my Copious Free Time(tm)
- dreeves 15y ago
  Yes, I use it regularly. Most common is for the kinds of things you might find in the CIA Factbook, or any number you'd expect to be buried in a Wikipedia page. The most recent thing I was impressed by was this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+to+sunburn http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+to+sunburn I also tried creating a widget with WolframAlpha that seemed potentially useful: http://beeminder.com/agename.html http://beeminder.com/agename.html (ie, getting a probability distribution on a person's age based on their first name)
  - kilian 15y ago
    It says my name is not a valid input, that's pretty harsh.
    - wtn 15y ago
      So did Renren, the China-based Facebook clone. Characters in the Latin alphabet do not count as names when one tries to sign up there :(
  - T-R 15y ago
    The sunburn one is a cool concept, but most of the data I put in tells me that sunburn is unlikely in Phoenix, AZ.
    - crag 15y ago
      Or that a sunburn is unlikely in Miami, Florida (which is where I am).
      - dreeves 15y ago
        That's because it was night time. :) You can actually include a time and date. Another handy heuristic: worry about sunburn when your shadow's shorter than you.
- tybris 15y ago
  I use it for pretty much all calculations, solving and rewriting equations, currency conversions, and basic stock comparisons. It's way better than google calculator for those things. Just add it to your bookmarks bar.
- bbgm 15y ago
  I use it for conversions and as the go to calculator on my iPad.
- jraines 15y ago
  When I was moving/job hunting I used it a lot for cost of living adjusted comparison of salaries.
- 46Bit 15y ago
  All the time - use it to check my answers to pretty much every calculus question I do, then if I get any wrong just use the Steps to work out better approaches in future. Never really looked into Google Calc though.
- reinhardt 15y ago
  Not regularly but I used it recently at work to compute symbolically the sum of a non-trivial series. Turned out the sum has a closed form, which allowed me to replace an O(n) for loop with an O(1) bunch of additions, multiplications and divisions. Felt nice.
  - steve19 15y ago
    Can you give an example?
    - reinhardt 15y ago
      Sure, here's one: given a list of n items, compute the sum of pairwise distances between every pair of items. The first item has distance 1 from the second, 2 from the third, ..., n-1 from the last. Similarly, the second item has distance 1 from the third, 2 from the fourth, ..., n-1 from the last. And so on until the (n-1)-th item. Expressed as a finite sum, this amounts to: sum (sum j, j=1 to n-i), i=1 to n-1 Paste this to Wolphram Alpha and you get the answer in a closed form: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+%28sum+j%2C+j%3D1+to+n-i%29%2C+i%3D1+to+n-1 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+%28sum+j%2C+j%3D1+t...
- dchest 15y ago
  I use it for time calculations (timezones, differences, etc.)
- kylemaxwell 15y ago
  I'd say that this is where Wolfram falls down the most: even those of us who /probably/ are smack dab in the middle of the farther audience don't really understand the use cases. If Wolfram can figure that out, or (more specifically) if I could figure it out for me, then I'd use it much more often. But until I get that handle on it...
- Dn_Ab 15y ago
  I do. I like to think and walk. Being able to whip up my phone and say something like plot d/dxdydz of [some equation in 3 terms] or maximize f(x) or solve some differential equation in a mix of english and symbols is very convenient. On chrome, I also use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/acgimceffoceigocablmjdpebeodphgc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/acgimceffoceigocab.... -- What wolfram alpha is not good for is the trivia natural language stuff that they touted. Its very hit and miss, awesome when it works but often doesn't. Stuff like trying to find a list of countries orderable by gdp,average income, democratic index, crime is easier to put together using google. Its not just about comprehension, a lot of the data just is not there. A query that I was surprised it didn't get was "basketball player with highest field goal percentage". google got that easy.
- resdirector 15y ago
  I use it regularly for nutrition (calorie counting) and comparing foods, e.g. 100g of salmon, 100g chocolate etc. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100g+salmon+100g+chocolate http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100g+salmon+100g+chocol..., or http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=potassium+in+1+cubic+lightyear+of+bananas&x=0&y=0 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=potassium+in+1+cubic+li....
- rorrr 15y ago
  Yeah, love the google calculator. I wished it had support for high precision numbers.
wrrice 15y ago
Running a query on 'linux users' returns, among other things, phone keypad digits for 'l-i-n-u-x', and Scrabble scoring. Not what I need.
- 46Bit 15y ago
  It's not a search engine. It's an information engine. Enter what you want, not just two random words with no 'question'.
  - wrrice 15y ago
    I then asked 'how many people are using Linux?'. It seems to think I'm asking 'how many people use the word 'Linux', as it returns the same result set as my initial query (word definitions and such). I ran the same query again with 'Linux' as an operating system topic, and it tells me that "Development of this topic is under investigation.." Then it asks me to leave my email address to show interest.
- wrrice 15y ago
  And I would point out that the same query, given to Google, returns a suggestion to search for 'number or Linux users', which is what I was thinking. Google doesn't know much, but it knows enough to get me where I'm going without having to think, or type, much. Isn't that what it's all about? I understand the geeks downvoting me, though. Wolfram Alpha is 'really neat' and 'really neat' is what we like. What I don't understand is this idea that hammering a nail with a toolbox is a smart way to do things.
  - tzs 15y ago
    Try these in Google: flights visible from Modesto, CA cepheids visible from Modesto, CA distance from Mars to Jupiter Now try them in WolframAlpha. See the difference? Google is a search engine. It tries to find web pages that it thinks are relevant to those searches. It is very sophisticated at this, so as to try to figure out what pages actually have the information, and which just happen to have the words. However, since these are things that probably no one has written about on the web, you get nothing really useful. WolframAlphas is NOT a search engine. It treats those same queries as requests to try to answer them from its databases or by computing them from things that are in its databases. So, for the first it figures out that you are interested in scheduled airplane flights that you can see from a particular location. It has airline flight data and radar tracking data, and from that, and it's model of visibility, it figures out what planes could possibly be seen from Modesto, taking into account their last known position and heading and extrapolating to account for the fact that the radar data it gets is behind by something like 15 minutes. (Click on a flight in the resulting list, and it gives you neat information about it, such as when it took off, how late that was, a plot of its course, graphs of altitude vs. time, groundspeed vs. time, and heading vs. time). The second is similar. It figures out that Cepheids are a kind of star, gets a list of the 100 brightest Cepheids, and figures out which are above the horizon at Modesto, CA, right now. For the third, it decides you are talking about planets (although you can tell it you mean Jupiter, FL and one of the several cities named Mars if you wish), and from their orbital information (which it has in its database) it calculates where they are now, and tells you the distance between them.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
gfodor 15y ago
Still waiting on W|A to incorporate basic usability improvements I proposed back in 2009: http://codingthriller.blogspot.com/2009/05/fixing-wolframalpha.html http://codingthriller.blogspot.com/2009/05/fixing-wolframalp...
jasim 15y ago
Most people who've commented about using Wolfram Alpha are just using just its Mathematica backend - calculations, plotting graphs etc. I found this pretty useful while trying to solve some algorithmic coding challenges which involved large numbers. Mathematica works with numbers larger than what either Python or Ruby can support. But otherwise apart from the Math part, haven't heard any use case yet where the data analysis that Wolfram Alpha does was terribly useful.
- jacobolus 15y ago
  Python integers have unlimited size. It’s true though that the support for fractions, numbers with whole multiples of π and e, square roots of arbitrary numbers, etc., is better in Mathematica/Maple than a general-purpose programming language.
- foob 15y ago
  I find it very useful when dealing with unit conversions and fundamental constants. Google is fine for simple stuff but Alpha really excels when you have extremely complicated combinations of units. This probably doesn't matter much outside of physics but within it Wolfram Alpha is a godsend.
ojosilva 15y ago
But Wolfram is frustrated a bit that users don’t know the full power of Wolfram Alpha. “The mental model for when to go to Wolfram Alpha is not fully fleshed out yet,” Wolfram says. This frustration reminds me of Google Wave, a wonderful idea, on the verge of being totally disruptive, but that the average user wouldn't grasp. Hopefully WA can sort that out, otherwise it may just remain a web API to a data-rich Mathematica, which in any case is a nice thing to have.
btcoal 15y ago
When I'm planning out my meals I use W|A to calculate calories. It's incredibly useful for this. I love that it not only gives point estimates for fat, sodium, etc., but also plots the distribution of these values: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4oz+turkey+breast http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4oz+turkey+breast Other than this, very special case, I never use it. And I am a former Mathematica fanatic.
veidr 15y ago
I tend to wolfram it when googling it fails. E.g. when considering buying a new place in Tokyo: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=historical+interest+rates+in+Japan http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=historical+interest+rat... Compare those awesome results to the crap google offers: http://www.google.com/search?safari&rls=en&q=historical+interest+rates+in+Japan&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 http://www.google.com/search?safari&rls=en&q=histori... Google is more generally useful, and has changed all of our lives for the better. Nevertheless, Wolfram Alpha is far more useful in certain contexts, in my experience, and not necessarily just for mathy stuff.
- Canopy 15y ago
  A problem with Wolfram (today?) is that it thinks in English. For most non native english users in the world, building a search in Wolfram is to hard, compared to Google which need only the core words. I'm impressed each time I see a successful query but it's always a query made by somebody else : each time I try WA gives me useless numbers unrelated to my query.
pnathan 15y ago
Queries that I have are usually answered by DuckDuckGo/Wikipedia.
armored 15y ago
I purchased the Android app, but I find I just don't use it that much. I'm not even sure that it's that the 'mental model' isn't fleshed out yet, it's just that Google got there first. Search, scan, refine. It's how I think now. Maybe there is a space for Alpha at the end of that sequence.
dxbydt 15y ago
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=savings+rate+US http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=savings+rate+US vs http://www.google.com/search?q=savings+rate+US http://www.google.com/search?q=savings+rate+US no contest. I use wolfram exclusively for all my economics homeworks. Google is quite useless for that. Say I'm crunching mortgage data. The engine needs to hit http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/releases/mortoutstand/current.htm http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/releases/mortoutst... and calculate totals & graph that. Wolfram does those things. Google doesn't.
vpdn 15y ago
"I’ve been lucky enough to run a company that’s been profitable for 23 years, so I developed the habit of doing things that way [..] That’s a way of doing business, that if you think about it, computes much better than getting tens of millions in funding for an iPhone app."

71 points by spottiness 15y ago

hugh3 15y ago

I like Wolfram Alpha, but despite being way towards the top of the "people most likely to find a use for Wolfram Alpha" list, I've only found a use for Wolfram Alpha a couple of times. I use Google Calculator all the freaking time, and only resort to Wolfram Alpha on the odd occasion that Google Calculator fails me. Does anyone use it regularly?

neutronicus 15y ago
I use it for unit conversions sometimes, but its parser and its understanding of Gaussian electromagnetic units leave a lot to be desired. It's also good for a quick Taylor series when I don't feel like firing up Sage.
ColinWright 15y ago
I used it to create the graphs and compute the solutions for my recent blog post: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/AnOddityInTennis.html?HN http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/AnOddityInTennis.html?HN I found it really useful to have a facility on-line that let me do those calculations and draw those graphs. I'm interested - what would you use instead?
- btcoal 15y ago
  R
  - ColinWright 15y ago
    But that's not an on-line solution. I have half a dozen desktop solutions. I don't (yet) use R, although it's on my "To Do" list for my Copious Free Time(tm)
dreeves 15y ago
Yes, I use it regularly. Most common is for the kinds of things you might find in the CIA Factbook, or any number you'd expect to be buried in a Wikipedia page. The most recent thing I was impressed by was this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+to+sunburn http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+to+sunburn I also tried creating a widget with WolframAlpha that seemed potentially useful: http://beeminder.com/agename.html http://beeminder.com/agename.html (ie, getting a probability distribution on a person's age based on their first name)
- kilian 15y ago
  It says my name is not a valid input, that's pretty harsh.
  - wtn 15y ago
    So did Renren, the China-based Facebook clone. Characters in the Latin alphabet do not count as names when one tries to sign up there :(
- T-R 15y ago
  The sunburn one is a cool concept, but most of the data I put in tells me that sunburn is unlikely in Phoenix, AZ.
  - crag 15y ago
    Or that a sunburn is unlikely in Miami, Florida (which is where I am).
    - dreeves 15y ago
      That's because it was night time. :) You can actually include a time and date. Another handy heuristic: worry about sunburn when your shadow's shorter than you.
tybris 15y ago
I use it for pretty much all calculations, solving and rewriting equations, currency conversions, and basic stock comparisons. It's way better than google calculator for those things. Just add it to your bookmarks bar.
bbgm 15y ago
I use it for conversions and as the go to calculator on my iPad.
jraines 15y ago
When I was moving/job hunting I used it a lot for cost of living adjusted comparison of salaries.
46Bit 15y ago
All the time - use it to check my answers to pretty much every calculus question I do, then if I get any wrong just use the Steps to work out better approaches in future. Never really looked into Google Calc though.
reinhardt 15y ago
Not regularly but I used it recently at work to compute symbolically the sum of a non-trivial series. Turned out the sum has a closed form, which allowed me to replace an O(n) for loop with an O(1) bunch of additions, multiplications and divisions. Felt nice.
- steve19 15y ago
  Can you give an example?
  - reinhardt 15y ago
    Sure, here's one: given a list of n items, compute the sum of pairwise distances between every pair of items. The first item has distance 1 from the second, 2 from the third, ..., n-1 from the last. Similarly, the second item has distance 1 from the third, 2 from the fourth, ..., n-1 from the last. And so on until the (n-1)-th item. Expressed as a finite sum, this amounts to: sum (sum j, j=1 to n-i), i=1 to n-1 Paste this to Wolphram Alpha and you get the answer in a closed form: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+%28sum+j%2C+j%3D1+to+n-i%29%2C+i%3D1+to+n-1 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+%28sum+j%2C+j%3D1+t...
dchest 15y ago
I use it for time calculations (timezones, differences, etc.)
kylemaxwell 15y ago
I'd say that this is where Wolfram falls down the most: even those of us who /probably/ are smack dab in the middle of the farther audience don't really understand the use cases. If Wolfram can figure that out, or (more specifically) if I could figure it out for me, then I'd use it much more often. But until I get that handle on it...
Dn_Ab 15y ago
I do. I like to think and walk. Being able to whip up my phone and say something like plot d/dxdydz of [some equation in 3 terms] or maximize f(x) or solve some differential equation in a mix of english and symbols is very convenient. On chrome, I also use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/acgimceffoceigocablmjdpebeodphgc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/acgimceffoceigocab.... -- What wolfram alpha is not good for is the trivia natural language stuff that they touted. Its very hit and miss, awesome when it works but often doesn't. Stuff like trying to find a list of countries orderable by gdp,average income, democratic index, crime is easier to put together using google. Its not just about comprehension, a lot of the data just is not there. A query that I was surprised it didn't get was "basketball player with highest field goal percentage". google got that easy.
resdirector 15y ago
I use it regularly for nutrition (calorie counting) and comparing foods, e.g. 100g of salmon, 100g chocolate etc. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100g+salmon+100g+chocolate http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100g+salmon+100g+chocol..., or http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=potassium+in+1+cubic+lightyear+of+bananas&x=0&y=0 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=potassium+in+1+cubic+li....
rorrr 15y ago
Yeah, love the google calculator. I wished it had support for high precision numbers.

wrrice 15y ago

Running a query on 'linux users' returns, among other things, phone keypad digits for 'l-i-n-u-x', and Scrabble scoring. Not what I need.

46Bit 15y ago
It's not a search engine. It's an information engine. Enter what you want, not just two random words with no 'question'.
- wrrice 15y ago
  I then asked 'how many people are using Linux?'. It seems to think I'm asking 'how many people use the word 'Linux', as it returns the same result set as my initial query (word definitions and such). I ran the same query again with 'Linux' as an operating system topic, and it tells me that "Development of this topic is under investigation.." Then it asks me to leave my email address to show interest.
wrrice 15y ago
And I would point out that the same query, given to Google, returns a suggestion to search for 'number or Linux users', which is what I was thinking. Google doesn't know much, but it knows enough to get me where I'm going without having to think, or type, much. Isn't that what it's all about? I understand the geeks downvoting me, though. Wolfram Alpha is 'really neat' and 'really neat' is what we like. What I don't understand is this idea that hammering a nail with a toolbox is a smart way to do things.
- tzs 15y ago
  Try these in Google: flights visible from Modesto, CA cepheids visible from Modesto, CA distance from Mars to Jupiter Now try them in WolframAlpha. See the difference? Google is a search engine. It tries to find web pages that it thinks are relevant to those searches. It is very sophisticated at this, so as to try to figure out what pages actually have the information, and which just happen to have the words. However, since these are things that probably no one has written about on the web, you get nothing really useful. WolframAlphas is NOT a search engine. It treats those same queries as requests to try to answer them from its databases or by computing them from things that are in its databases. So, for the first it figures out that you are interested in scheduled airplane flights that you can see from a particular location. It has airline flight data and radar tracking data, and from that, and it's model of visibility, it figures out what planes could possibly be seen from Modesto, taking into account their last known position and heading and extrapolating to account for the fact that the radar data it gets is behind by something like 15 minutes. (Click on a flight in the resulting list, and it gives you neat information about it, such as when it took off, how late that was, a plot of its course, graphs of altitude vs. time, groundspeed vs. time, and heading vs. time). The second is similar. It figures out that Cepheids are a kind of star, gets a list of the 100 brightest Cepheids, and figures out which are above the horizon at Modesto, CA, right now. For the third, it decides you are talking about planets (although you can tell it you mean Jupiter, FL and one of the several cities named Mars if you wish), and from their orbital information (which it has in its database) it calculates where they are now, and tells you the distance between them.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

gfodor 15y ago

Still waiting on W|A to incorporate basic usability improvements I proposed back in 2009: http://codingthriller.blogspot.com/2009/05/fixing-wolframalpha.html http://codingthriller.blogspot.com/2009/05/fixing-wolframalp...

jasim 15y ago

Most people who've commented about using Wolfram Alpha are just using just its Mathematica backend - calculations, plotting graphs etc. I found this pretty useful while trying to solve some algorithmic coding challenges which involved large numbers. Mathematica works with numbers larger than what either Python or Ruby can support. But otherwise apart from the Math part, haven't heard any use case yet where the data analysis that Wolfram Alpha does was terribly useful.

jacobolus 15y ago
Python integers have unlimited size. It’s true though that the support for fractions, numbers with whole multiples of π and e, square roots of arbitrary numbers, etc., is better in Mathematica/Maple than a general-purpose programming language.
foob 15y ago
I find it very useful when dealing with unit conversions and fundamental constants. Google is fine for simple stuff but Alpha really excels when you have extremely complicated combinations of units. This probably doesn't matter much outside of physics but within it Wolfram Alpha is a godsend.

ojosilva 15y ago

But Wolfram is frustrated a bit that users don’t know the full power of Wolfram Alpha. “The mental model for when to go to Wolfram Alpha is not fully fleshed out yet,” Wolfram says. This frustration reminds me of Google Wave, a wonderful idea, on the verge of being totally disruptive, but that the average user wouldn't grasp. Hopefully WA can sort that out, otherwise it may just remain a web API to a data-rich Mathematica, which in any case is a nice thing to have.

btcoal 15y ago

When I'm planning out my meals I use W|A to calculate calories. It's incredibly useful for this. I love that it not only gives point estimates for fat, sodium, etc., but also plots the distribution of these values: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4oz+turkey+breast http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4oz+turkey+breast Other than this, very special case, I never use it. And I am a former Mathematica fanatic.

veidr 15y ago

I tend to wolfram it when googling it fails. E.g. when considering buying a new place in Tokyo: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=historical+interest+rates+in+Japan http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=historical+interest+rat... Compare those awesome results to the crap google offers: http://www.google.com/search?safari&rls=en&q=historical+interest+rates+in+Japan&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 http://www.google.com/search?safari&rls=en&q=histori... Google is more generally useful, and has changed all of our lives for the better. Nevertheless, Wolfram Alpha is far more useful in certain contexts, in my experience, and not necessarily just for mathy stuff.

Canopy 15y ago
A problem with Wolfram (today?) is that it thinks in English. For most non native english users in the world, building a search in Wolfram is to hard, compared to Google which need only the core words. I'm impressed each time I see a successful query but it's always a query made by somebody else : each time I try WA gives me useless numbers unrelated to my query.

pnathan 15y ago

Queries that I have are usually answered by DuckDuckGo/Wikipedia.

armored 15y ago

I purchased the Android app, but I find I just don't use it that much. I'm not even sure that it's that the 'mental model' isn't fleshed out yet, it's just that Google got there first. Search, scan, refine. It's how I think now. Maybe there is a space for Alpha at the end of that sequence.

dxbydt 15y ago

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=savings+rate+US http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=savings+rate+US vs http://www.google.com/search?q=savings+rate+US http://www.google.com/search?q=savings+rate+US no contest. I use wolfram exclusively for all my economics homeworks. Google is quite useless for that. Say I'm crunching mortgage data. The engine needs to hit http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/releases/mortoutstand/current.htm http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/releases/mortoutst... and calculate totals & graph that. Wolfram does those things. Google doesn't.

vpdn 15y ago

"I’ve been lucky enough to run a company that’s been profitable for 23 years, so I developed the habit of doing things that way [..] That’s a way of doing business, that if you think about it, computes much better than getting tens of millions in funding for an iPhone app."