Foo - Wolfram alpha sucks big time, reminds me of Cuil. A big bag of fail!

anyone tried this yet ? I have dozens of perfect questions for this bag of crap and it
gets me zero, nada, zip.


http://www.wolframalpha.com/

I've tried it and actually watched the launch webcast Friday night. Some searches come up empty and some spit back rather interesting data. I can't speak for anyone else, but I think the key to it is not to think of it as a replacement to google or ask. It's a totally different animal and "we" just need to figure out how to feed it properly. Whether it catches on and develops into something big is yet to be determined.

I can tell you one thing, it certainly isn't up to snuff in the medical field. If Wolfram alpha catches a cold, it won't live long enough to become Wolfram beta.

I asked it for the mortality rate of the swine flu, and it responded that it didn't know what to do with my question.

So I told it what it could do with my question, and it replied "Sorry, Dave, I can't do that."

Pfft. Last time a computer told me that, I turned into a reincarnated SpaceBaby. Not doing that again, let me tell you.

At least it gets one thing right!

http://www23.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+meaning+of+life

The demo video looked fairly awesome, but I haven't gotten it to do much for me. Maybe you have to be some sort of Einstein to use it. Leaves me out.

I'm a math major (math graduate, now), and I queried "x^5-x-1", and was fairly impressed with the results (graphs of the function, real and complex roots and their points on the complex plane, the derivative and antiderivative of the function, and polynomial discriminant--whatever that is). I guess that shouldn't come as a surprise, though, being from Wolfram. But now you can do stuff online that Wolfram and Mathematica can do (although I have little experience in either, and I'm sure they're more powerful than WA)--I guess 'putting' apps online is the big thing, and it's nice that this has come along.

Fail

http://www75.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=couch+incident

Fail

Couch

I'm a math major (math graduate, now), and I queried "x^5-x-1", and was fairly impressed with the results (graphs of the function, real and complex roots and their points on the complex plane, the derivative and antiderivative of the function, and polynomial discriminant--whatever that is). I guess that shouldn't come as a surprise, though, being from Wolfram. But now you can do stuff online that Wolfram and Mathematica can do (although I have little experience in either, and I'm sure they're more powerful than WA)--I guess 'putting' apps online is the big thing, and it's nice that this has come along.

I entered "Cauchy sequence", "discrete topology", and "Dedekind cut", and got nothing for each of them.

But maybe I'm not using it right.

Got good results for "taylor series expansion of sin(x^2+1)+log(x)" though. Maybe one needs to be specific.

I'm figuring out that WolframAlpha is not a search engine and shouldn't be expected to behave like one.

I was going to say, it sure handles calculations nicely....but that's been mentioned. It will process all the way to heaviside calculations.

Got good results for "taylor series expansion of sin(x^2+1)+log(x)" though. Maybe one needs to be specific.

Ha, really? That would have been useful for the complex analysis class I just finished.

Also, the reason I queried "x^5-x-1"? In the final for that class, I guessed that that equation had 5 roots in C (because C is algebraically closed, so all the polynomials in C[x] factor into polynomials of degree 1), and used that to compute a derivative. I lost a point or two because of that 'guess' (I didn't state my reasoning). Oh well, too late to change the grading now.