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A comment on Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) Than Google. Parent comment

Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by Gompers on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @08:16PM (#617867)
"When Wolfram Alpha starts solving word problems..."

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/novak/cgi/physdemo.cgi

It's no Wolfram|Alpha, but it solves word problems fairly well.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by bayareaguy on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @02:08AM (#618174)
Unfortunately both this and Alpha are trivial to confuse:

  What is the area of a circle with radius "2x"
yields 3.1415926535897931 * 2x^2 which is obviously incorrect. Alpha on the other hand doesn't give a result unless simplified to

  area of a circle with radius (2x)
where it gives a nonsensical display alongside the fact that 4pi is about 12.5664.
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Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by Gompers on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @03:11AM (#618225)
It may give you the wrong answer, but it makes it hard to be led astray:

  Evaluated area = pi * radius^2  giving AREA = 3.1415926535897931 * 2x^2
That description makes it obvious that a pair of parentheses are the only thing lacking.
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