Wolfram - what is the speed of an unladen swallow?
wolframalpha.com
wolframalpha.com
Q: speed of light in glass A: c (speed of light) and small glasses are not compatible
Q: magnetic moment of cobalt atom A: wolfram alpha isn't sure what to do with your input
(note just "cobalt" has the information but you have to dig a little)
Q: band structure of bismuth A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input
Q: polarizability of sodium atom A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
Q: dipole moment of water A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
Q: isotopes of copper A: good job! (this one actually gives me what I'm looking for)
I just read it can do music so..
Q: bach A: has a very small amount of info and a cute timeline of birth and death
<same for charles mingus, and ozzy osbourne>
Q: bach english suites A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
It's also really annoying that it does the HAL9000 thing like every other query.
Nice effort - better luck next time. I'm sticking with the CRC handbook and GOOG.
WA does seem to have IOR list of common materials, but that is easily obtainable from almost everywhere, however you can then use to calculate further down the road with WA
In this respect it feels like the sort of thing that has always annoyed me about expert systems: it's useful to the extent that you are already familiar with what data is curated therein, and want a handy way to look it up, but rather frustrating for surfing and exploration. I do like it...but I can't help sharing some people's view that it's sort of an ad for Mathematica.
It will find a use as citation source - you can embed statistics or factual info in your web page and reference Alpha, in relative comfort that the data there is factually correct. On the other hand, the lack of specificity in the citation info means it won't be quite adequate for academic use, at least not just yet. Might be that its best market will be among high school students who will a) buy Mathematica later and b) grow up with Alpha as past generations did with their slide rules or TI calculators, and stick with it as it evolves.
I didn't take time to play with the API yet - superficially it looks flexible, but I'm only a hobby coder. Much depends on where Wolfram draws the line between openness and proprietary use.
Q: goog trading volume
A: works! I get a chart, but the volume is in shares, I want it in dollars but haven't been able to get that. From all I tried, only "GOOG trading volume / volume in dollars" seems to understand but doesn't show me anything. OTOH "GOOG trading volume monthly" works as expected. So basic unit conversions work, but not something like "for all days calculate number of shares by closing price" which would give me the volume in USD.
I also wanted to see a histogram of the daily volumes, but hasn't been able to. All "GOOG trading volume distribution | histogram | variance" just don't work.
A look on another domain shows that it knows something about movies (e.g. the name of the movie shows me a list of actors and other info), but doesn't cross-reference this information (the name of an actor gets me nothing, I expected at least a list of movies).
If anyone succeeds in figuring out how to get some of these answers, please reply! W|A doesn't seem to have a place where I can ask for help. Probably it just can't make those inferences though.
Q: mass of five hydrogen atoms
A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
Q: distance traveled by space shuttle in one day
A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
Q: explosive energy of five sticks of dynamite
A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
Q: number of keys on a US keyboard
A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
Q: world war 2 deaths
A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
...
The queries I tried were:
Q:distance traveled by space shuttle in one day
A:Lots of links, none of which gives canonical answer.
Q:explosive energy of five sticks of dynamite
A:Lots of links, only a few of which deal with dynamite the explosive.
Query time was roughly 9:30 AM Central Time Sunday May 16, 2009.
Q: [space shuttle speed]
A: 17,500 mph
Q: [17,500 * 24]
A: 420,000
Q: [dynamite explosive energy]
A: 2.1 million joules
Q: [2.1 * 5]
A: 10.5 million joules
Curiously, a lot of people do use full-sentence queries - perhaps it's the lingering aftereffects of their 3rd grade teachers. If Wolfram Alpha can handle those correctly, it'll be a big win. But other search engines have tried - Ask.com is based around being able to ask questions in natural language. And it never seems to work that way - computers don't seem to know which of the many things you say are irrelevant.
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid
I can't do that...
Wolfram|Alpha has temporarily
exceeded its maximum test load.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+licks+does+it+...
Its another Powerset, trying to provide more accessible pathways to data tables. NLP seems to be a very tough nut to crack because Powerset is embarrassingly poor at this (despite some very clever people working on the problem) and W|A follows in their footsteps. Given sufficient data and much better parsing of that data this could be useful. Comparing it to Google is pointless because Google is a search engine, and W|A is not. W|A is a knowledge retrieval engine. CIA World Factbook on steroids.
I think the project should get government funding, expand the datasets dramatically and it will become another way to lookup facts and perform calculations on those facts. A useful tool for people in their everyday lives, but the sophistication needs to exponentially expand to have 'everyday usefulness', for example, if I can do queries like 'trend crime rates in San Francisco by neighborhood', or, 'aggregate opinions on canon 5dII, summarize' etc.
We are looking at something very primitive, but the concept is one very worthy of further research. When we figure a way for data models on any topic to be represented in a consistent and universally accessible format (akin to what Wikipedia is as a human NLP level) and these nuggets be shared such that an engine like W|A can process them we will really be on to something...
W|A is an attempt to let us query all of human knowledge the way we query our own memories. And the best use of it is to see if it also likes Monty Python?
Result: a woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood
(according to the tongue-twister)"
That was actually surprisingly helpful, as I've never heard the second part! And now I know.
[edit]
"Input interpretation: how many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man? (etc.)
Result: the answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind (according to Bob Dylan)"
They've thought of everything!
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+an+unladen+eur...
It's not as sure about unladen African swallows though.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+an+unladen+afr...
My alma mater doesn't show up as "U of MN," which gets me a calculus problem, but "University of Minnesota" disambiguates nicely among the different campuses. But the information about the flagship campus hits some good information, but misses some too. Try your favorite university for the terms
[name of university] cost of attendance
or
[name of university] admission rate
or
[name of university] SAT range
or other things that people actually look up about colleges.
http://www.style.org/unladenswallow/
The speed calculations are based on the Strouhal number http://www.style.org/strouhalflight/
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=speed+of+an+unladen+swallow...
Though to be fair, I don't think Wolfram had unladen swallows in mind for Alpha.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=meaning+of+life
I guess they knew their audience enough to answer the obvious questions.
'Interpreting "VMware" as "voxware"'
hmm.. thinks I want the flight time between Western, New York and Australia (19 hours 5 minutes if anyone's interested)
Every geographical location I've tried keeps giving me a us equivalent one :(
But, it's early days yet and this is a long term project. Can't wait to see what this is capable of in a year
Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
http://www.google.com/search?q=airspeed+velocity+unladen+swa...
Second link.
Maybe I should talk to a shrink... Or anyone else who didn't do science or engineering at university, for that matter.