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omarish

You guys need to go easy on the negativity. I think HP laughed at Woz's first computer prototype..

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Using it, you can tell there is some huge potential.

For example, these nifty queries:

us debt / us population / us life expectancy in days

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+debt+%2F+us+populati...

and

(MSFT net income / MSFT employees)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28MSFT+net+income+%2F+...

us debt / us population / us life expectancy in days

What does that mean, to you, in everyday language? I see what WolframAlpha did with that, but what is the implication of that answer for a real-world concern?

It is the amount of debt each American has to pay off each day.

Except, you know, it isn't.

Assuming zero interest :-)

Now if we could tell it to consider interest then I would be impressed.

You'd need an interest function. Use historical data? Specify a regression? Have it try to calculate last average?

Even then, you'd need to have some objective value of worth to understand what $0.92 means. Right now, it only measures the value of the dollar. :-/

Some kind of debt slavery calculation? :)

It definitely still has a long way to go. For example, it cannot understand area Pittsburgh / area Kanazawa or population density Pittsburgh / population density Kanazawa which seems less complex than the above queries. Alpha is, however, aware of the populations of each city.

It still needs work for more complex queries:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=debt+%2F+pop++japan%2C+...

So there's a small bug when you look at France. Also, it took trial and error to get a query that actually worked. (ex: comparing debt / pop / LE between multiple countries instead of debt / pop leads to more bugs)

Fortunately for Woz, he probably didn't have all the hype in the world surrounding his product. Wolfrom might be an interesting experiment, but all of the Google-killer talk might make it into more of a Cuil.

But did we really expect this to be a "Google killer"? Nahh... My problem is that even when compared to the pitch made in the demo, even as a tool for simply data retrieval, it seems to fail.

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