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Comment by brucethemoose2 | Hacker News Reader

Wolfram Alpha was my ChatGPT when I was in school. And many of the same issues ("how will kids learn math now?") were raised at the time.

...Yeah, this seems like a great match, no complaints from me. Those kinds of responses are exactly what LLMs need.

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Wolfram Alpha was (at least initially) famously bad* at actually parsing natural language. For math, it was much easier to enter raw Mathematica expression into Wolfram Alpha than structuring the question in natural language. LLMs should give it a boost, by simplifying the kind of the natural language input into the limited forms parsable by Wolfram Alpha.

*: And I say this as a paying customer of Mathematica on my computer and Wolfram Alpha on my phone.

Obviously if you can write Mathematica, that's far more precise than any natural language query, but I think it's always been impressively good at it. You wouldn't say that, say, Python or MySQL is good at parsing natural language - but if you plug a query like:

    gravitational constant times density of tungsten carbide times the volume of the earth divided by radius of earth squared

into !wa or Wolfram Alpha it will not only represent the parsed tokens as it interpreted them but also return the correct result of 27 m/s^2, without messing with tedious unit conversions. It's trivial to construct incorrect queries, but where Python just says "SyntaxError" !wa will make an attempt.

WolframAlpha is still bad at natural language.

I recently tried to get it to convert mpg to l/100km. I spent close to 10 minutes until I stumbled into a combination that gave the answer among a sea of useless conversions.

I don't doubt your experience, having been frustrated many times myself, but in case anyone is curious, my first and most obvious guess worked:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=convert+5+mpg+to+L%2Fkm

It’s per 100km. I tried a few prompts, wolfram didn’t get it right!

Sorry! Totally missed that! Indeed it seems more difficult.

In the end this sorta works: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=convert+%285+mpg%29+to+...

Because way down in the "Corresponding quantities" it shows "0.47 L/km" and "47 L/100 km"

I agree for the most part, but the part that scares me is that kids know less and less about how these things work. It is just too magical. The last post by Wolfram taught me how limited it was. I never thought there could be a workable merger between the two platforms. So this scares me.

That's the entire point. There is ongoing critique here in germany, that the school system and especially STEM topics have been undermined by years of horrible legislature, pushed by MBA's that only want slightly better qualified personnel for much worse pay. The syllabus in math got stripped down to bare essentials and even then it still focuses a lot of methodology, that is unfit to prepare students for academia. Lifting the overall graduation rate for degrees that qualify for college is no help (50% of of all students in germany are elligible for starting a degree).

The result are college freshmen that don't know how to do arithmetic with fractions, much less higher math. I was able to graduate without being able to integrate.

And now OpenAI comes along and is about to apply even more pressure to this underqualified workforce. I'm already preparing for the whole "Given the recent advances in AI, why should I hire you?" shenanigans. And I personally know people whose job consists basicially just of writing E-Mails and coordinating employees. If you'd ask HN about them, they're basicially a worthless human individual, a parasite leeching off of corporate money that shouldn't exist, or at least seriously consider sepukku if they had any morale.

Ah we're on the Foundation path just without the psychology.

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