Wolfram Alpha is Live

[creativeinsomnia]

http://www.wolframalpha.com

I'm sure you've heard of it by now. Give it a try...pretty neat. Also has an API available. It's running pretty slow for me, hopefully that's not always the case.

[atRax]

Tx for the news I totally forgot about it, but seeing how slow it is right now I hope frustration wont pull the people away from it.

I wonder if google with their Trendalyzer soft might catch up with time and if wolfgram will kill wikipedia?

Love the = to

[realMakc]

I asked mc^2= and it said 1210000... dumb. What's even dumber is that answers are actually pictures, not text. Kill wikipedia? Come on.

[realMakc]

Another ingenious answer to fisting: "fisting (English word)"...

[realMakc]

wa's pr0n vs google's pr0n... hmmm.... okay maybe you think wtf, Wolfram is mathematician and does not count these things as "systematic knowledge". okay, let's ask it about math:

catmull rom spline: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

same thing at google: more than 20k results estimated.

[realMakc]

a question from official "tips for good results": how many men in Mauritania - great answer, ok. same question about my home city: "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."

my conclusion: wa sucks. dismissed

[Jujumon]

cool if u just want some quick info. a bit slow at the moment.

[Adobemedia]

@realMakc

Wolfram is not Google.... yet. If you actually read the information about their intent on their site, you would realize that.

[realMakc]

No I dont think so. They may be very well excited about thousands of algorithms built into system, but if they are "not sure" how to handle a question different from successfully answered one in single word, all these algorithms do suck.

[ctranter]

The Ukrainian Eurovision entry was funny.

[ihoss.com]

Funny how people always expect new technology to behave identically to old technology.

[gerbick]

Funny how people always expect new technology to behave identically to old technology.

Thank you for saying this.

[WannaBe_80z]

Maybe there is a plus for this after all

http://www.thedoghousediaries.com/?p=475

[asheep_uk]

Why the bloody hell would you write the word 'alpha' into your web address? Think about all the links that aren't going to work when they move onto beta...

I can't spell Wolfram yet without looking it up in Google, so yeah that's going well, but I didn't used to be able to remember YouTube and had to type in 'video' to Google for a few months. And before that I could never remember how to spell Google so had to use Yahoo to find it. Before that I had Altavista written on a piece of paper stuck to my monitor and before that I didn't have the internet.

[silverx2]

wolf- howls at the moon
ram- from st louis

wolfram

some of whedon nerds might put "and hart" at the end...

[jAQUAN]

already a ff plug
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10245721-2.html

[ctranter]

I used to use mathworld.wolfram.com for homework

also, asheep, you should try bookmarks, they're kinda useful for that sort of thing

[silverx2]

im sure he would if he could remember what the icon looked like.

[lesli_felix]

Wolfram tried to revolutionise the way we approach science with his 2002 book "a new kind of science". In it, he completely failed to do that, and he did it by re-hashing old ideas about cellular automata that weren't original and selling them as his own.

Now he makes a crappy version of askjeeves that only works with maths questions and it's been suggested that it will revolutionise search? I'm not convinced.

Out of google, wikipedia and wolfram.mathworld, the closest he comes to actually competing is with his own site.