tbh wolfram alpha was the craziest thing ever. haven't done much research on how this was implemented back in the day but to achieve what they did for such complex mathematical problems without AI was kind of nuts
If you mean that it all breaks down to if/else at some level then, yeah, but that goes for LLMs too. LLMs aren't the quantum leap people seem to think they are.
The whole point of algorithmic AI was that it was deterministic and - if the algorithm was correct - reliable.
I don't think anyone expected that soft/statistical linguistic/dimensional reasoning would be used as a substitute for hard logic.
It has its uses, but it's still a poor fit for many problems.
We're still at the stage of eating pizza for the first time. It'll take a little while to remember that you can do other things with bread and wheat, or even other foods entirely.
Lisp was the AI language until the first AI Winter took place, and also took Prolog alongside it.
Wolfram Alpha basically builds on them, to put in a very simplistic way.
Doesn't need the craziest math capability but standard symbolic math stuff like expression reduction, differentiation and integration of common equations, plotting, unit wrangling.
All with an easy to use text interface that doesn't require learning.
https://maxima.sourceforge.io/
I used it when it was called Macsyma running on TOPS-20 (and a PDP-10 / Decsystem-20).
Text interface will require a little learning, but not much.
- Mathematica
- Maple
- MathStudio (mobile)
- Ti-89 calculator (high school favorite)
Others:
- SageMath
- GNU Octave
- SymPy
- Maxima
- Mathcad
We only call it AI until we understand it.
Once we understand LLMs more and there's a new promising poorly understood technology, we'll call our current AI something more computer sciency