7 ms·

Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) Than Google

63 points by Flemlord 17y ago

Femur 17y ago
I think once the general public, who generally think of Alpfa as a Google competitor, realize Alpha's strengths and how to use it, it will be come a very powerful and commonly used tool. I can't wait for the API to be released so that all the Hackers out there can do things Mr. Wolfram hasn't imagined yet.
- nazgulnarsil 17y ago
  never base a business plan on educating the public. :p
  - param 17y ago
    that made me LOL. An ex-colleague started his own company to increase availability of cheap robotic tools in Indian high-schools. I know this isn't what you meant, but it made me think of him.
ErrantX 17y ago
Fair comments. For fun I typed the first query they mention into google... And look what it found: http://screencast.com/t/8Z66EsDoz http://screencast.com/t/8Z66EsDoz Sneaky! So is google going to be the new way to search WA? ;)
skorgu 17y ago
They're missing the one feature I found killer: Unit parsing in math. Doing something like "sixteen miles per hour in km/ns * 14 hogsheads per parsec" Just Works in Alpha[1], it fails miserably in Google. Sure you can make it work with parens and careful phrasing but... [1] http://www23.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sixteen+miles+per+hour+in+km%2Fns+*+14+hogsheads+per+parsec http://www23.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sixteen+miles+per+hou...
- las3rjock 17y ago
  I've run into some weird bugs trying to perform calculations in Wolfram|Alpha. For example, I cannot come up with any query for the general question "human height vs Empire State Building" that works, even though the separate queries "height Empire State Building" and "height average male" return answers with units of length.
  - skorgu 17y ago
    It comes roughly close with something like "empire state building height + average human height" but yeah, that's quite odd. Edit: And hitting "Show details" for a breakdown.
  - Retric 17y ago
    Adding "average" helps it parse the question. height Empire State Building divided by average height human = 235 height Empire State Building divided by height human Fails
    - evilneanderthal 17y ago
      Neat. a billion light years / average height human * (1/9) furlong / age universe = 1.01 c (speed of light) Very neat.
    - las3rjock 17y ago
      I was pretty sure I tried every permutation of the words "average," "height," and "human," but I guess I didn't. Bravo.
  - mechanical_fish 17y ago
    Don't take this the wrong way -- I know where you're coming from, and it's natural to push the boundaries, especially for a hacker. But let's stop to appreciate how hilarious this comment looks to someone who majored in physics in the era just before the web. It's like eavesdropping on the gods as they complain about the quality of this year's batch of ambrosia. You own a machine that returns a meaningful number for "height Empire State Building" and "height average male". In less than a second. And which will perform floating-point division for you, at the press of a few keys. And you're vaguely unhappy because you can't do it all in one step! Now I know how Hans Bethe (acknowledged grandmaster of the slide rule, who routinely computed logarithms in his head) must have felt when he heard the young grad students comparing the features on their scientific calculators. I wonder if tools like Wolfram Alpha will eventually succeed in doing for Fermi problems what Google did for Trivial Pursuit: Turning an activity that was formerly regarded as a touchstone of intelligence into a typing exercise. Estimating the number of piano tuners in Chicago will be a lot less impressive when you can just type "piano tuners in Chicago" into a text box and get the answer back to within a decimal place. Fortunately, right now typing "piano tuners in Chicago" into Alpha just makes Javascript crash in Safari, so I guess we humans can sleep soundly for a while longer. ;)
abecedarius 17y ago
"rely on Wolfram Alpha to either give you the right answer (depending, of course, on the accuracy of its own index), or no answer at all." This is wrong because of weaknesses in query parsing/explaining. I tried out Archimedes's sand-reckoner problem (how many grains of sand it takes to fill the solar system); it rephrased my query as "planets volume / volume of a small grain of sand" (which sounds reasonable) and gave an answer off by 17 orders of magnitude, taking "planets volume" to be the volume of the median-sized planet among all the planets. Its query explanation didn't link to any explanation of "planets volume", so I had to make that a separate query to find that out. They could solve this problem with a better interface to its understanding of your query.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  I tried: volume of all planets / volume of a grain of sand and I got a graph going back to 1994 of: (the trading volume of Allstate stock) * (volume of all planets in the solar system) / (volume of a grain of sand)
  - dangoldin 17y ago
    Interesting! It's because ALL is the ticker symbol of Allstate. volume of planets / volume of a grain of sand gets the desired result
    - las3rjock 17y ago
      That query calculates "median planet volume / volume of a small grain of sand", as mentioned by the grandparent poster. I believe it is still an open question how to get Wolfram|Alpha to calculate "total planet volume / volume of a small grain of sand".
      - dangoldin 17y ago
        Ah my mistake. I tried "9 * average (planet volume) / average(volume of a grain of sand)" now but that's not working either.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
callahad 17y ago
Query challenge: When you ask for the time in an arbitrary location, like Irkutsk, Russia: http://www31.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+in+irkutsk http://www31.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+in+irkutsk Alpha returns a "Clocks" view of your location and the location you typed in. The challenge: Find a query to show the clock view for two arbitrary locations. ...And then post it here, because I'm stumped.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
jamiequint 17y ago
Query: Oregon Tax Result: 0% = 0/2
tamersalama 17y ago
it properly responds to "the answer to life, the universe and everything" http://www88.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=the+answer+to+life,+the+universe+and+everything http://www88.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=the+answer+to+life,+t...
blogimus 17y ago
No libraries of congress per fortnight (yet), but it does recogize Smoot. Here's Smoots per fornight in cubits per leap year http://www65.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=smoots+per+fortnight+in+cubits+per+leap+year http://www65.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=smoots+per+fortnight+...
redsymbol 17y ago
The most interesting thing about Alpha so far is the effectiveness of its public relations. A LOT of news organizations are talking about this. I've honestly been trying to ignore it, but that has been hard :) Very curious how they built that kind of press coverage. I'm sure they hired a good PR firm, but still. (It's scary how much I've become fascinated by marketing issues lately. Am I turning into a sales/marketing person?! I'll be the only marketer who VCs his emacs extensions in a git repo...)
WilliamLP 17y ago
I've found it's very useful as a food nutrition calculator. E.g. "protein 200g chicken breast".
zandorg 17y ago
VAT - Nope. VAT In Europe - Nope. Value Added Tax in Europe - Nope.
10ren 17y ago
WA needs the option of explicit operators, so you can specify your query precisely. For example, for financial entities, you get a drop-down menu choice of Fundamentals, Ratios, Balance sheet and so on - but you can't specify these in a query. Eg: http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nike+Ratios http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nike+Ratios gives you the fundamentals, not the ratios. But you can pick one of the ratios, and get a comparison (couldn't get this to work before): http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=return+on+equity++nke+orcl+msft+java+goog http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=return+on+equity++nke...

63 points by Flemlord 17y ago

Femur 17y ago

I think once the general public, who generally think of Alpfa as a Google competitor, realize Alpha's strengths and how to use it, it will be come a very powerful and commonly used tool. I can't wait for the API to be released so that all the Hackers out there can do things Mr. Wolfram hasn't imagined yet.

nazgulnarsil 17y ago
never base a business plan on educating the public. :p
- param 17y ago
  that made me LOL. An ex-colleague started his own company to increase availability of cheap robotic tools in Indian high-schools. I know this isn't what you meant, but it made me think of him.

ErrantX 17y ago

Fair comments. For fun I typed the first query they mention into google... And look what it found: http://screencast.com/t/8Z66EsDoz http://screencast.com/t/8Z66EsDoz Sneaky! So is google going to be the new way to search WA? ;)

skorgu 17y ago

They're missing the one feature I found killer: Unit parsing in math. Doing something like "sixteen miles per hour in km/ns * 14 hogsheads per parsec" Just Works in Alpha[1], it fails miserably in Google. Sure you can make it work with parens and careful phrasing but... [1] http://www23.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sixteen+miles+per+hour+in+km%2Fns+*+14+hogsheads+per+parsec http://www23.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sixteen+miles+per+hou...

las3rjock 17y ago
I've run into some weird bugs trying to perform calculations in Wolfram|Alpha. For example, I cannot come up with any query for the general question "human height vs Empire State Building" that works, even though the separate queries "height Empire State Building" and "height average male" return answers with units of length.
- skorgu 17y ago
  It comes roughly close with something like "empire state building height + average human height" but yeah, that's quite odd. Edit: And hitting "Show details" for a breakdown.
- Retric 17y ago
  Adding "average" helps it parse the question. height Empire State Building divided by average height human = 235 height Empire State Building divided by height human Fails
  - evilneanderthal 17y ago
    Neat. a billion light years / average height human * (1/9) furlong / age universe = 1.01 c (speed of light) Very neat.
  - las3rjock 17y ago
    I was pretty sure I tried every permutation of the words "average," "height," and "human," but I guess I didn't. Bravo.
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  Don't take this the wrong way -- I know where you're coming from, and it's natural to push the boundaries, especially for a hacker. But let's stop to appreciate how hilarious this comment looks to someone who majored in physics in the era just before the web. It's like eavesdropping on the gods as they complain about the quality of this year's batch of ambrosia. You own a machine that returns a meaningful number for "height Empire State Building" and "height average male". In less than a second. And which will perform floating-point division for you, at the press of a few keys. And you're vaguely unhappy because you can't do it all in one step! Now I know how Hans Bethe (acknowledged grandmaster of the slide rule, who routinely computed logarithms in his head) must have felt when he heard the young grad students comparing the features on their scientific calculators. I wonder if tools like Wolfram Alpha will eventually succeed in doing for Fermi problems what Google did for Trivial Pursuit: Turning an activity that was formerly regarded as a touchstone of intelligence into a typing exercise. Estimating the number of piano tuners in Chicago will be a lot less impressive when you can just type "piano tuners in Chicago" into a text box and get the answer back to within a decimal place. Fortunately, right now typing "piano tuners in Chicago" into Alpha just makes Javascript crash in Safari, so I guess we humans can sleep soundly for a while longer. ;)

abecedarius 17y ago

"rely on Wolfram Alpha to either give you the right answer (depending, of course, on the accuracy of its own index), or no answer at all." This is wrong because of weaknesses in query parsing/explaining. I tried out Archimedes's sand-reckoner problem (how many grains of sand it takes to fill the solar system); it rephrased my query as "planets volume / volume of a small grain of sand" (which sounds reasonable) and gave an answer off by 17 orders of magnitude, taking "planets volume" to be the volume of the median-sized planet among all the planets. Its query explanation didn't link to any explanation of "planets volume", so I had to make that a separate query to find that out. They could solve this problem with a better interface to its understanding of your query.

stcredzero 17y ago
I tried: volume of all planets / volume of a grain of sand and I got a graph going back to 1994 of: (the trading volume of Allstate stock) * (volume of all planets in the solar system) / (volume of a grain of sand)
- dangoldin 17y ago
  Interesting! It's because ALL is the ticker symbol of Allstate. volume of planets / volume of a grain of sand gets the desired result
  - las3rjock 17y ago
    That query calculates "median planet volume / volume of a small grain of sand", as mentioned by the grandparent poster. I believe it is still an open question how to get Wolfram|Alpha to calculate "total planet volume / volume of a small grain of sand".
    - dangoldin 17y ago
      Ah my mistake. I tried "9 * average (planet volume) / average(volume of a grain of sand)" now but that's not working either.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

callahad 17y ago

Query challenge: When you ask for the time in an arbitrary location, like Irkutsk, Russia: http://www31.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+in+irkutsk http://www31.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+in+irkutsk Alpha returns a "Clocks" view of your location and the location you typed in. The challenge: Find a query to show the clock view for two arbitrary locations. ...And then post it here, because I'm stumped.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

jamiequint 17y ago

Query: Oregon Tax Result: 0% = 0/2

tamersalama 17y ago

it properly responds to "the answer to life, the universe and everything" http://www88.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=the+answer+to+life,+the+universe+and+everything http://www88.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=the+answer+to+life,+t...

blogimus 17y ago

No libraries of congress per fortnight (yet), but it does recogize Smoot. Here's Smoots per fornight in cubits per leap year http://www65.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=smoots+per+fortnight+in+cubits+per+leap+year http://www65.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=smoots+per+fortnight+...

redsymbol 17y ago

The most interesting thing about Alpha so far is the effectiveness of its public relations. A LOT of news organizations are talking about this. I've honestly been trying to ignore it, but that has been hard :) Very curious how they built that kind of press coverage. I'm sure they hired a good PR firm, but still. (It's scary how much I've become fascinated by marketing issues lately. Am I turning into a sales/marketing person?! I'll be the only marketer who VCs his emacs extensions in a git repo...)

WilliamLP 17y ago

I've found it's very useful as a food nutrition calculator. E.g. "protein 200g chicken breast".

zandorg 17y ago

VAT - Nope. VAT In Europe - Nope. Value Added Tax in Europe - Nope.

10ren 17y ago

WA needs the option of explicit operators, so you can specify your query precisely. For example, for financial entities, you get a drop-down menu choice of Fundamentals, Ratios, Balance sheet and so on - but you can't specify these in a query. Eg: http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nike+Ratios http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=nike+Ratios gives you the fundamentals, not the ratios. But you can pick one of the ratios, and get a comparison (couldn't get this to work before): http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=return+on+equity++nke+orcl+msft+java+goog http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=return+on+equity++nke...