Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) Than Google

Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by abecedarius on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @01:17PM (#617153)

"rely on Wolfram Alpha to either give you the right answer (depending, of course, on the accuracy of its own index), or no answer at all."

This is wrong because of weaknesses in query parsing/explaining. I tried out Archimedes's sand-reckoner problem (how many grains of sand it takes to fill the solar system); it rephrased my query as "planets volume / volume of a small grain of sand" (which sounds reasonable) and gave an answer off by 17 orders of magnitude, taking "planets volume" to be the volume of the median-sized planet among all the planets. Its query explanation didn't link to any explanation of "planets volume", so I had to make that a separate query to find that out.

They could solve this problem with a better interface to its understanding of your query.

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Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by stcredzero on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @01:41PM (#617199)

I tried:

    volume of all planets / volume of a grain of sand

and I got a graph going back to 1994 of:

    (the trading volume of Allstate stock) 
        * (volume of all planets in the solar system) 
           / (volume of a grain of sand)

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Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by dangoldin on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @01:56PM (#617237)

Interesting! It's because ALL is the ticker symbol of Allstate.

volume of planets / volume of a grain of sand gets the desired result

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Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by abecedarius on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @05:58PM (#617706)

The volume in question was actually that of the classical "sphere of fixed stars" -- I input it initially as something like "volume of the solar system" and had a brief impulse to accept its rephrasing as "planets volume", especially when I couldn't drill down further into its explanation. It's pretty natural to just assume it knows what you meant.

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Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by las3rjock on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @02:15PM (#617287)

That query calculates "median planet volume / volume of a small grain of sand", as mentioned by the grandparent poster. I believe it is still an open question how to get Wolfram|Alpha to calculate "total planet volume / volume of a small grain of sand".

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Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by PhazeDK on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @03:05PM (#617398)

"solar system volume / volume of grain of sand" works. http://www54.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solar+system+volume+/...

or "planets volume / volume of grain of sand"

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Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by dangoldin on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @02:36PM (#617338)

Ah my mistake.

I tried "9 * average (planet volume) / average(volume of a grain of sand)" now but that's not working either.

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Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by jodrellblank on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @02:38PM (#617342)

"total planetary volume / volume of a grain of sand" gives an answer in "mile cubed shares per picoliter".

Yowch.

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Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by las3rjock on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @02:00PM (#617252)

The query "total volume planets" yields a reasonable answer for that part of the problem, but I can't convince Wolfram|Alpha to divide it by "volume of a small grain of sand"... :-/

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