
Wolfram Alpha Needs an Open Source Version - phreeza
http://www.pointlessrants.com/2009/10/wolframalpha-needs-an-open-source-version/
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ISL
In the very long term, Mathematica needs an open-source equivalent. Someday
Wolfram might open it; it would be a gift to humanity.

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larrydag
I'm not sure what you can do in Mathematica that you couldn't do in R
<http://www.r-project.org>

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rm999
It's been a long time since I used Mathematica, but I always used it for
symbolic computations (e.g. "derivative of x^2 = 2x"), especially when I was
learning calculus and differential equations. As far as I'm aware R doesn't
even natively have a way of storing symbolic equations, let alone solving them
(at the least, it's not its main use-case).

But I could be wrong; I used mathematica and R for very different things so I
may just be unaware of their similarities.

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larrydag
<https://code.google.com/p/ryacas/> to name one. It's not native but yet so
aren't a lot of libraries in other languages.

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owyn
Hasn't been updated since 2007... math doesn't really change that often but
that does not look promising...

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ivan_ah
I think there are at least three different ideas being discussed here:

1/ A web-calculator which does more advanced functions. See
<http://live.sympy.org/#example> and Sage Web Notebooks -- hell even google
does quite a few things.

2/ A natural language science search thingie -- i.e. a smart algorithm which
understands what data to shoot at you given your query. (query recognition ML?
NLP?)

3/ An open source / community-editable platform for editing scripts for 2/.

I can imagine there are some interesting lessons about machine learning and
NLP to be learned from such a project. In particular 3/ seems like a good
thing to have in general: functional modules (transformations?) which take
some input data and produce another type of data.

The components 1/, 2/ and 3/ above would work really well if restricted to a
specific application domain. This way we would have a chance of competing with
Wolfram and understand verbs from that domain + use structured data from
dbpedia et al.

Very cool. pm me if you are working on any of the above. I would like to help.

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hahla
I've actually have been working on a site that does this exact same thing for
the past few months. I could definitely use some help from developers - feel
free to drop me a line if anyone wants to talk.

I personally feel that calculator software should be open source and easy to
modify, it not only allows people to learn the background processes by
inspecting the code, but it has numerous other educational benefits.

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acebarry
Are you planning on making it modular? If you made it something similar to
what DuckDuckGo (<http://duckduckhack.com/>) does that would be very
interesting. I would also contribute if that was the case.

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ojr
It will be rather hard to compete with 15 million lines of Mathematica and
over 25 years of research but you have to start somewhere
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Alpha#Technology>

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owyn
This blog post is from 2009, I think Wolfram Alpha was pretty new back then.
It would be interesting to know what he was looking for and if it still isn't
there.

His example of a query that doesn't work seems to return data now, when typed
slightly differently:

Not working link taken from blog post:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=graph+u.s.+unemployment...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=graph+u.s.+unemployment%2C+graph+u.s.+minimum+wage)

Working result:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=graph+u.s.+unemployment...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=graph+u.s.+unemployment+vs+minimum+wage)

I think it would be great to have a nice open source symbolic math package
with a good UI, but for the 3 times a year that I need to know how to factor
some equation like (x-1)/(sqrt(x)-1) , wolfram alpha does a pretty good job!

I need to explore sage and mathics more, they both look cool

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Avshalom
While I get the point, wikipedia works because people with weird hobbies can
get away with just text if they want to.

getting data into the right shape for gnu|alpha or wolfram|alpha|community is
probably not as trivial

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paulgb
Check out the dbpedia graph, they're doing much of this already. For example,
for structured info about San Francisco:
<http://dbpedia.org/page/San_Francisco>

Here are their datasets: <http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Datasets>

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jrochkind1
He doesn't really mean 'open source'. He means "user contributed content".
Which is an entirely different thing. You could run wikipedia on closed-
source/proprietary software if you wanted to.

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bitwize
But how else would you preserve the myth of Stephen Wolfram's unique genius
than by keeping Wolfram stuff proprietary?

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taliesinb
Well, if Sergey Brin had finished his intern project we _would_ have an open
source version of Mathematica :-).

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det23x
Say, what?

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nswanberg
Sergey interned at Wolfram Research:
[http://www.wolfram.com/company/scrapbook/page07.html#1993_ML...](http://www.wolfram.com/company/scrapbook/page07.html#1993_MLanguage)

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segmond
wolfram doesn't need to be open source. you want/need and open source version
of wolfram.

