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Comment by dcurtis | Hacker News Reader

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dcurtis·

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+...

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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)

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? :)

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