The answer is 42
Last week the eccentric genius Stephen Wolfram released his new intelligent search engine WolframAlpha. The idea is to provide a search engine that takes questions in ordinary language. The ever humble Wolfram reports to the world
I’m happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work…
I was, however, rather underwhelmed by some aspects of the Statistics and Data Analysis interface. Have a look at the regression example. Would anybody in their right mind do a regression through this tool? It seems to me that the existence of such a tool trivialises data analysis and invites thoughtless statistical summaries. On the other hand, the statistical distribution section looks pretty helpful, especilaly for students, and might even save me from having to move my carcass out of my seat and hauling down Johnson and Kotz.
The developers do have a sense of humour. When the system cannot answer your question (or when it is overloaded) it replies
I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.
and if you type in the question “life the universe and everything….”
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May 20th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Reasonably impressive, but a little unpolished. I tried “will it rain in brisbane tomorrow?”, and it gave me a waether forecast (rain). I tried “why is the sky blue?” and it gave me an explanation of Rayleigh scattering. And of course, it told me “42″ when I asked the right question.
Other popular culture questions did less well. I tried “Where does Santa Clause live?” only to a “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input” “computation timed out”. So - still not up to a typical three year old.
May 20th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Among other test queries, I tried the following sequence:
“Where is London”
“Where is the Sydney Opera House”
“Where is Mars”
“Where is Ceres”
“Where is Osama bin Laden”
“Where am I”
“Where is my sister”
Results were fascinating!
I think this has potential, but it’s certainly not going to be my first place to look for information for a while yet.
May 20th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
It didn’t quite pass the Turing Test as far as I was concerned:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Test
May 21st, 2009 at 9:44 am
Has anyone tried the question, “Does a dog have Buddha consciousness?”
May 26th, 2009 at 11:54 am
I needed a quick summary sheet for “cronbach’s alpha.” I tried
cronbach’s alpha
cronbach alpha
cronbach
what is cronbach alpha
who is cronbach
and got nothing useful. It has never heard of Cronbach and instead gives the response: Interpreting “Cronbach” as “grunbach” in almost every case. Looks like this little piece of genius was released too early.