4 ms·

You guys need to go easy on the negativity. I think HP laughed at Woz's first computer prototype..

• schwanksta 17y ago
  Fortunately for Woz, he probably didn't have all the hype in the world surrounding his product. Wolfrom might be an interesting experiment, but all of the Google-killer talk might make it into more of a Cuil.
  • quizbiz 17y ago
    But did we really expect this to be a "Google killer"? Nahh... My problem is that even when compared to the pitch made in the demo, even as a tool for simply data retrieval, it seems to fail.
    • deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
• dcurtis 17y ago
  Using it, you can tell there is some huge potential. For example, these nifty queries: us debt / us population / us life expectancy in days http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+debt+%2F+us+population+%2F+us+life+expectancy+in+days&asynchronous=false&equal=Submit http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+debt+%2F+us+populati... and (MSFT net income / MSFT employees) http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28MSFT+net+income+%2F+MSFT+employees%29&asynchronous=false&equal=Submit http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28MSFT+net+income+%2F+...
  • tokenadult 17y ago
    us debt / us population / us life expectancy in days What does that mean, to you, in everyday language? I see what WolframAlpha did with that, but what is the implication of that answer for a real-world concern?
    • jibiki 17y ago
      It is the amount of debt each American has to pay off each day. Except, you know, it isn't.
      • aneesh 17y ago
        Assuming zero interest :-)
        • quizbiz 17y ago
          Now if we could tell it to consider interest then I would be impressed.
          • silentOpen 17y ago
            You'd need an interest function. Use historical data? Specify a regression? Have it try to calculate last average? Even then, you'd need to have some objective value of worth to understand what $0.92 means. Right now, it only measures the value of the dollar. :-/
    • johnnybgoode 17y ago
      Some kind of debt slavery calculation? :)
  • dbul 17y ago
    It definitely still has a long way to go. For example, it cannot understand area Pittsburgh / area Kanazawa or population density Pittsburgh / population density Kanazawa which seems less complex than the above queries. Alpha is, however, aware of the populations of each city.
  • tl 17y ago
    It still needs work for more complex queries: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=debt+%2F+pop++japan%2C+debt+%2F+pop+us%2C+debt+%2F+pop+france%2C+debt+%2F+pop+china http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=debt+%2F+pop++japan%2C+... So there's a small bug when you look at France. Also, it took trial and error to get a query that actually worked. (ex: comparing debt / pop / LE between multiple countries instead of debt / pop leads to more bugs)