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A comment on Wolfram Alpha Live.

Re:Wolfram Alpha Live by omarish on Friday May 15, 2009 @09:43PM (#611705)
You guys need to go easy on the negativity. I think HP laughed at Woz's first computer prototype..
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Re:Wolfram Alpha Live by dcurtis on Friday May 15, 2009 @10:03PM (#611724)
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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Re:Wolfram Alpha Live by dbul on Friday May 15, 2009 @11:18PM (#611804)
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.
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Re:Wolfram Alpha Live by tl on Saturday May 16, 2009 @02:05AM (#611926)
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)

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Re:Wolfram Alpha Live by tokenadult on Friday May 15, 2009 @10:24PM (#611750)
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?

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Re:Wolfram Alpha Live by jibiki on Friday May 15, 2009 @10:30PM (#611757)
It is the amount of debt each American has to pay off each day.

Except, you know, it isn't.

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Re:Wolfram Alpha Live by aneesh on Friday May 15, 2009 @10:49PM (#611776)
Assuming zero interest :-)
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Re:Wolfram Alpha Live by quizbiz on Friday May 15, 2009 @11:05PM (#611787)
Now if we could tell it to consider interest then I would be impressed.
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Re:Wolfram Alpha Live by silentOpen on Saturday May 16, 2009 @02:48AM (#611970)
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. :-/

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Re:Wolfram Alpha Live by johnnybgoode on Friday May 15, 2009 @10:30PM (#611759)
Some kind of debt slavery calculation? :)
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Re:Wolfram Alpha Live by schwanksta on Friday May 15, 2009 @09:48PM (#611711)
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.
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Re:Wolfram Alpha Live by quizbiz on Friday May 15, 2009 @10:05PM (#611727)
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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