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Comment by programnature | Hacker News Reader

In the meantime, they just released a screencast demo done by Stephen Wolfram. It seems to be getting lost in the other news of the day but its pretty cool.

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/13/stephen-wolframs-int...

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Whoah! I've used Mathematica a lot and I had high expectations for Wolfram Alpha, but this... was just incredible. Thank you so much for posting it.

I wonder if they'd consider opening the system up for others to develop 'plug-ins' covering more knowledge areas.

After seeing that, I strongly suspect my browser will get a 3rd text box next go the google search.

So... at about 3:30, he enters "6000 words". One of the calculations is wrong (screenshot: http://byrneseyeview.tumblr.com/post/107322432/i-was-just-wa...).

Am I missing something? Did the Mathematica inventor do a screencast with a multiplication error? Or is he using a video / mockup rather than an actual Alpha?

There are 5999 spaces between words. But that still leaves him 1 character short.

Unless, of course, he's assuming a 6000-word sentence with no punctuation except the period at the end.

That is some really amazing stuff. I can't wait to play with it myself.

one thing that strikes me how can it logically say "the gdp of france / italy" should be interpreted as "the gdp of france divided by the gdp of Italy" that makes no sense to me.... clearly the context suggests that I want to know the GDP of both countries side by side.

Actually im underwhelmed by it :( which is sad.

because it interprets "/" as mathematical division and "vs." as comparison.

they chose to use some specific, static operators so that you can do interesting things with the data, instead of having it simplify your request to what you "probably" want.

how many non-mathematicl non techy people (who realistically might want data like this, say, for a school report) would use vs. rather than /. it's just not natural english.

I understand your point: and I would have figured it out. But this is marketed as an everydfay search engine - which it's not, it's an advanced search for an encyclopedia :)

how many non-tech people would even assume that the search engine could produce this type of comparative results without learning about it first? in that process of learning, you learn how it works, and learn that /=division, vs=comparison

i imagine if it turns out to be a common problem, they'll probably give you a little reminder message about it. "if you're looking for data comparison, use vs. instead of /"

That little learning for technically literate (small percentage of users) could be a show stopper for the rest. Many people are scared of even the simple maths (sad but true).

Isn't it silly to judge a huge system by a single query which happened to to one logical thing instead of another?

That is an interesting interpretation, though I think its correct to assume that you are trying to specify a computation rather than presentation.

In general its best to thing of that input field as a API with a huge syntax space, rather than something that is actually "understanding" anything. Getting the side-by-side comparisons can be done in many ways, like just using a comma instead of /

my main point is that it is the "understanding" idea that WA is being presented as (either by Wolfram or the media I dont know). It obviously isnt: so people will get confused...

He mentions that simply putting items in a series would generate comparisons, so I think you'd get what you want by taking out the / operator.

(edited, no need for "vs.", just series seems to do the trick)

It looks incredible. I think Google are right to be concerned. Others should be too - take the mortgage example: it wouldn't be hard to integrate current deals on offer from mortgage providers.

One query I'd like to build is a TCO for a particular model of car based on running cost, service cost and the probability I will die in a crash which obviously limits my future earnings.

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