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Wolfram Alpha is better at actually doing math, but far worse at explaining what it’s doing, and why.
by Filligree 2y ago
Wolfram Alpha is better at actually doing math, but far worse at explaining what it’s doing, and why.
- dartos 2y agoWhat’s worse about it? It never tells you the wrong thing, at the very least.
- fn-mote 2y agoIts understanding of problems was very bad last time I used it. Meaning it was difficult to communicate what you wanted it to do. Usually I try to write in the Mathematica language, but even that is not foolproof. Hopefully they have incorporated more modern LLM since then, but it hasn’t been that long.
- jampekka 2y agoWolfram Alpha's "smartness" is often Clippy level enraging. E.g. it makes assumptions of symbols based on their names (e.g. a is assumed to be a constant, derivatives are taken w.r.t. x). Even with Mathematica syntax it tends to make such assumptions and refuses to lift them even when explicitly directed. Quite often one has to change the variable symbols used to try to make Alpha to do what's meant.
- jvanderbot 2y agoWhen you give it a large math problem and the answer is "seven point one three five ... ", and it shows a plot of the result v some randomly selected domain, well there could be more I'd like to know. You can unlock a full derivation of the solution, for cases where you say "Solve" or "Simplify", but what I (and I suspect GP) might want, is to know why a few of the key steps might work. It's a fantastic tool that helped get me through my (engineering) grad work, but ultimately the breakthrough inequalities that helped me write some of my best stuff were out of a book I bought in desperation that basically cataloged linear algebra known inequalities and simplifications. When I try that kind of thing with the best LLM I can use (as of a few months ago, albeit), the results can get incorrect pretty quickly.
- kens 2y agoWhat book was it that you found helpful?
- jvanderbot 2y agoA survey on matrix theory and matrix inequalities - Marvin Marcus https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/048667102X/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/048667102X/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
- seattleeng 2y agoIm reviewing linear algebra now and would also love to know that book!
- jvanderbot 2y agoIt was this one (in case you miss sibling response): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/048667102X/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/048667102X/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... I make no claim about its usefulness for anyone else!
- PeeMcGee 2y ago> [...], but what I (and I suspect GP) might want, is to know why a few of the key steps might work. It's been some time since I've used the step-by-step explainer, and it was for calculus or intro physics problems at best, but IIRC the pro subscription will at least mention the method used to solve each step and link to reference materials (e.g., a clickable tag labeled "integration by parts"). Doesn't exactly explain why but does provide useful keywords in a sequence that can be used to derive the why.
- amelius 2y agoI wish there was a way to tell Chatgpt where it has made a mistake, with a single mouse click.
- akoboldfrying 2y agoWhat's surprising to me is that this would surely be in OpenAI's interests, too -- free RLHF! Of course there would be the risk of adversaries giving bogus feedback, but my gut says it's relatively straightforward to filter out most of this muck.
- a3w 2y agoIs the explanation a pro feature? At the very end it says "step by step? Pay here"