Wolfram|Alpha
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I'm sure I don't need to tell the math geeks among you that wolfram|alpha is launching tomorrow, but for the uninitiated:
In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a “computational knowledge engine” for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you.
It doesn’t simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn’t just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn’t simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example. Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions — like questions that have factual answers such as “What country is Timbuktu in?” or “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?” or “What is the average rainfall in Seattle?”
Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn’t simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions.
So, what will be your first wolfram query? The number of transvestite hookers in Thailand divided by the number of baht in your wallet? Or the answers to your calculus homework that you should have been doing while you were smoking pot?
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
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I predict that the most popular question for day 1 will be: What is the meaning of life the universe and everything else...
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What's the URL of your web site?
Link here
Well, it is not online just yet. when it is, I will be asking it my question. If all goes as planned, I will hog all of it's resources for the next seven million years.
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*snort*
Thanks. I didn't know that services existed. Hell, I thought I was that service.
"Yes, I seriously believe that consciousness is a product of a natural process. I find that the neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who proceed from that premise are the ones who are actually making useful contributions to our understanding of the mind." - PZ Myers
Kay....
what
That's not what it was made for. It was made to tell you how many calories you'd be consuming if you ate your weight in pop tarts, see.
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
Oh, my mistake.
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
I have to say, I'm highly impressed with what I've seen so far. I'm actually quite excited about this now. It seems it's attracting 1.9 million visitors per day.
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here
- Lawrence Krauss
It seems like the reaction in some part has been negative based on the fact that as a search engine it's not as useful as Google. It think it's a bit of an unfair comparison because even though both protects started with similar goals they didn't start with the same goal.
Wolfram started with the long term goal of making all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. Google started with the goal of cataloging all the information on the earth and not necessarily for the use of everyone.
So potentially Wolfram could turn out to be smarter and more useful than conventional search engines.
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
This is my new most favorite web app.
Mine too.
I just searched December 25, 0001, and it reported no known major notable events for December 25, 1 a.d.
Thandarr
Thandarr
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