cyberjosh
Member
If you have never gone to www.wolframalpha.com and asked it a question before you really should try it! You will be fascinated and amazed. It is largely a computational engine so it deals with hard facts more than general questions but it is quite amazing the information it can spit out.
For example I asked it, "Who is George Whitefield?" and it gave me the date(s) and place(s) of his birth and death and his full name. It can pull from encyclopedias, newpapers, dictionaries, and has an entire mathematical engine (it can do calculus! - students love this no doubt...) at its disposal, among other things.
I was just watching Jeopardy tonight and saw the brand new IBM supercomputer called Watson stomp two former Jeopardy champions into the ground with its answers (in the appropriate question format), but it is more designed to pick up English nuances, colliquialisms, word play, pop culture, history, etc. You can see some clips of Watson competing (and winning) on Youtube already. It reminded me of Wolfram Alpha to an extent when I saw it so I googled and the creator of Wolfram Alpha was hailing Watson as a major leap forward in Artificial Intelligence and yet noted how Wolfram Alpha and Watson had two different ways at computing comprehensible answers and focused in two different domains of knowledge and applications, and said they could benefit from linking to each other. See the diagrams of comparison, of how they work, here: http://www.smartplanet.com/business...am-alpha-vs-ibms-watson-how-they-think/13912/.
But Wolfram Alpha can also understand some English terminology (from its dictionary references) to an extent as well. I was trying to think of a clever computation for it to do that included an uncommon unit of measurement in English. Then I thought of the perfect question: "How many seconds are in a fortnight?" Surprisingly it almost instantly gave me an answer: 1.21 x 10^6 seconds, and gave tons of other corresponding measurements in units of time, and gave some other fact about that amount in relation to the speed of light. Try that question for yourself to see the information it spits out.
Anyway, you can amuse yourself for hours with Wolfram Alpha. Try it out!
~Josh
For example I asked it, "Who is George Whitefield?" and it gave me the date(s) and place(s) of his birth and death and his full name. It can pull from encyclopedias, newpapers, dictionaries, and has an entire mathematical engine (it can do calculus! - students love this no doubt...) at its disposal, among other things.
I was just watching Jeopardy tonight and saw the brand new IBM supercomputer called Watson stomp two former Jeopardy champions into the ground with its answers (in the appropriate question format), but it is more designed to pick up English nuances, colliquialisms, word play, pop culture, history, etc. You can see some clips of Watson competing (and winning) on Youtube already. It reminded me of Wolfram Alpha to an extent when I saw it so I googled and the creator of Wolfram Alpha was hailing Watson as a major leap forward in Artificial Intelligence and yet noted how Wolfram Alpha and Watson had two different ways at computing comprehensible answers and focused in two different domains of knowledge and applications, and said they could benefit from linking to each other. See the diagrams of comparison, of how they work, here: http://www.smartplanet.com/business...am-alpha-vs-ibms-watson-how-they-think/13912/.
But Wolfram Alpha can also understand some English terminology (from its dictionary references) to an extent as well. I was trying to think of a clever computation for it to do that included an uncommon unit of measurement in English. Then I thought of the perfect question: "How many seconds are in a fortnight?" Surprisingly it almost instantly gave me an answer: 1.21 x 10^6 seconds, and gave tons of other corresponding measurements in units of time, and gave some other fact about that amount in relation to the speed of light. Try that question for yourself to see the information it spits out.
Anyway, you can amuse yourself for hours with Wolfram Alpha. Try it out!
~Josh