4 ms·

First, as random internet commentator guy, I want to thank Stephen for his contribution here. This and NKS are incredible. Second, I keep seeing videos and art

First, as random internet commentator guy, I want to thank Stephen for his contribution here. This and NKS are incredible. Second, I keep seeing videos and articles about Wolfram Alpha and am always left scratching my head kinda going "WTF?" So it's a knowledge-based purely symbolic programming language? Can it play Flappy Bird? Power the next cool startup? Give me an answer to a question I might have today? I've been to alpha a couple of times. Never seemed to be able to get the questions right to get the answers I wanted. I don't mean that to be negative. My point is that any audience is going to have a thousand different needs and viewpoints, most of which will probably seem trivial to Stephen Wolfram. Most new technologies get past this hurdle by open-sourcing. That way there's a thousand experiments, and over time a few of them are bound to give all of us little nerds a gleam in our eye one way or the other. The other way of doing this, where you have a single point of creation describing to the world how cool it is? It is limited to things that have a single terrific property that everybody can agree on. I'm not sure that is the case here. Still -- awesome stuff. Can't wait to watch this evolve.

primitivesuave 13y ago
> Can it play Flappy Bird? Power the next cool startup? Give me an answer to a question I might have today? Although it is possible to make games in Mathematica, it is a painful process. At the Wolfram Technology Conference two years ago, I met some startup founders who were using Mathematica for some big data projects. It works great for people as a tool to use in the background for visualization and data analysis, but it's definitely not at the stage where a startup thinks "I'm going to deploy Mathematica to the cloud" or "let's build our interface with Mathematica" the same way they think about Ruby on Rails or JavaScript.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  Yeah I really like where I think it is, but it still has that "mad genius" feel to it, where one guy explains how awesome it is and you're left kind of empty-handed. Want to see a lot more eyeballs on this and people playing with it. Hope Wolfram doesn't let "licensing fever" get in the way of the community understanding it fully.
  - primitivesuave 13y ago
    Here are some cool open source projects that use Mathematica. HadoopLink: https://github.com/shadanan/HadoopLink https://github.com/shadanan/HadoopLink ArduinoLink: https://github.com/keshavsaharia/ArduinoLink https://github.com/keshavsaharia/ArduinoLink
troymc 13y ago
I was playing around with Wolfram Alpha yesterday and found this page of examples: http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/ http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/
RogerL 13y ago
Q:"What is the standard deviation in height for humans?" A: inches and people are not compatible whereas: Q: what is the average height of humans? A: 5.3, with a nice graph showing the +- sigma So it had the info, but just couldn't understand the question. Whereas Q: what is the average height of male humans in Canada? gives me an answer and chart "weighted for USA demographics". If I change 'canada' to USA, I get a graph labelled the same, but with a different numerical value. I don't think I trust this. At least with Google and I can inspect the source, read links, and so on. One more: "What is a basis vector" Wolfram gives me the stock quote for BASI, google starts things off with the linear algebra definition followed by a lot of relevant links.
- tedsanders 13y ago
  To be fair, normally you say the standard deviation "of" a distribution, not the standard deviation "in" a distribution. When you use the word "of," the query works fine. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+standard+deviation+of+height+for+humans http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+standard+de...
pjmlp 13y ago
I would say it is a matter of available libraries, deployment options and how fast can the generated code execute. This type of systems is what I dream of, when I get my hands on old demos of the early Smalltalk and Lisp environments and try to imagine how would computing look like if those systems had gone mainstream. Being super productive at high abstraction level, but exposing enough knobs to go down to the metal if one really needs to. Oh well, dreaming is always possible.

primitivesuave 13y ago

> Can it play Flappy Bird? Power the next cool startup? Give me an answer to a question I might have today? Although it is possible to make games in Mathematica, it is a painful process. At the Wolfram Technology Conference two years ago, I met some startup founders who were using Mathematica for some big data projects. It works great for people as a tool to use in the background for visualization and data analysis, but it's definitely not at the stage where a startup thinks "I'm going to deploy Mathematica to the cloud" or "let's build our interface with Mathematica" the same way they think about Ruby on Rails or JavaScript.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago
Yeah I really like where I think it is, but it still has that "mad genius" feel to it, where one guy explains how awesome it is and you're left kind of empty-handed. Want to see a lot more eyeballs on this and people playing with it. Hope Wolfram doesn't let "licensing fever" get in the way of the community understanding it fully.
- primitivesuave 13y ago
  Here are some cool open source projects that use Mathematica. HadoopLink: https://github.com/shadanan/HadoopLink https://github.com/shadanan/HadoopLink ArduinoLink: https://github.com/keshavsaharia/ArduinoLink https://github.com/keshavsaharia/ArduinoLink

troymc 13y ago

I was playing around with Wolfram Alpha yesterday and found this page of examples: http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/ http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/

RogerL 13y ago

Q:"What is the standard deviation in height for humans?" A: inches and people are not compatible whereas: Q: what is the average height of humans? A: 5.3, with a nice graph showing the +- sigma So it had the info, but just couldn't understand the question. Whereas Q: what is the average height of male humans in Canada? gives me an answer and chart "weighted for USA demographics". If I change 'canada' to USA, I get a graph labelled the same, but with a different numerical value. I don't think I trust this. At least with Google and I can inspect the source, read links, and so on. One more: "What is a basis vector" Wolfram gives me the stock quote for BASI, google starts things off with the linear algebra definition followed by a lot of relevant links.

tedsanders 13y ago
To be fair, normally you say the standard deviation "of" a distribution, not the standard deviation "in" a distribution. When you use the word "of," the query works fine. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+standard+deviation+of+height+for+humans http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+standard+de...

pjmlp 13y ago

I would say it is a matter of available libraries, deployment options and how fast can the generated code execute. This type of systems is what I dream of, when I get my hands on old demos of the early Smalltalk and Lisp environments and try to imagine how would computing look like if those systems had gone mainstream. Being super productive at high abstraction level, but exposing enough knobs to go down to the metal if one really needs to. Oh well, dreaming is always possible.