Let’s say Google is sitting in a bar, he’s had four shots of Jack and three beers. A lovely lady who says her name is Vicki or something offers to buy Google a few more drinks. She is pretty hammered too. Naturally one thing leads to another and Google and the woman end up having an awkward conversation the next morning. Google asks for her name again, it wasn’t Vicki, it was Wiki, last name Pedia. 9 months later they give birth to an ugly but brilliant boy – his name is Wolfram Alpha.
What?
Wolfram Alpha, Google, and Wikipedia are all unrelated, but this is certainly how the family tree would form. Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine. Searching Wolfram is not like Google, it doesn’t return web pages; it doesn’t do written articles like Wikipedia either. It does return information because it has indexed many terabytes of databases. It’s difficult to explain it’s usefulness, but much easier to illustrate with examples.
Let’s say I was born on May 23rd 1984 in Baltimore Maryland and wanted to know more about that day. It was a Wednesday, the high was 78 degrees, the sun set at 8:21 PM, and the population of Baltimore has decreased since then.
Not impressed? Okay. Say I’m interested in learning more about Apples. An apple ranges in 7.2 to 8.4 mg of vitamin C, or 13% of the daily value; has 91 calories; and 45 mg of saturated fat. Yes apples have saturated fat. They also weigh 6.4 oz.
Still no go? Alright. Remember algebra? Algebra sucks. Know the answer to x + 5 = 48? If you said 43 then you passed middle school math, wow I’m so proud. What if instead the equation was x/2-10y^2=-100, can work that out? Did you know that can be rewritten as x+200 = 20 y^2? Can you solve for x? For y? Perhaps you could also graph the parabola for me. Wolfram can, and more.
Now I’ve got your attention. Here are some other things I learned, the lowest temperature in NYC over the last month (or so) was 45 degrees on April 23rd; an apple and two oranges is 234 calories and 270% of your daily vitamin C intake; “economics” is the 3222nd most commonly written word, but only the 3897th most commonly spoken word; the first written record of the word “fudge” as a verb was in 1674; and the name “Philip” peaked in popularity around 1950.
If you don’t follow how great this is then you’re just a loser, which, by the way, was first written in 1340.
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Said,
W – I blogged about this last week too. Wolfram seems pretty cool when you can think of some ways to make use of it’s purpose. You should try doing some stock searches and comparisons with it, like say doing a search for “apple ibm”. As well, doing a search on “retirement” brings up a pretty nifty calculator with some matrices and charts.
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