

Wolfram Alpha: Our First Impressions - mcav
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wolframalpha_our_first_impressions.php

======
smanek
On that note, any other HNers planning to be at the demo in Cambridge on
Tuesday? <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2009/04/wolfram>

It seems like it's worth going to - and it's directly related to something I'm
doing at work (inference over topic maps).

~~~
nsrivast
I'd like to, but it's full! I'll be watching the webcast ...

------
alain94040
Wolfram Alpha doesn't compete with Google, it competes with Wikipedia.

I expect students who use and quote Alpha as their source of information won't
get the same scorn than the ones who quote Wikipedia.

It will be an interesting battle: crowdsourcing vs. proof.

~~~
tlrobinson
And perhaps Freebase: <http://www.freebase.com/>

------
ashot
this sounds like something that spans the (rather wide) gap between google and
aws + public data sets. I wonder how far you can go in terms of combining
data/hacking on it?

For example they mention real-time financial data. So can I write something
that would connect online discussion/activity to stock movements?

A platform for doing large scale, real-time data analysis in a rich
descriptive language without doing any of the dirty work would be quite
something.

------
ComputerGuru
This is really interesting on many fronts... Google queries are trivial and
dumb - they take virtually no CPU power to execute (on a per-query basis) in
the grand scheme of things. But I'm trying to imagine how Wolfram Alpha will
scale, and I'm not really seeing it. You can't precache results, queries
require the aggregation and manipulation of huge data streams, and so on and
so forth.

Wolfram Alpha is going to be _expensive_ to keep up. It's good to see they've
already thought of this (with their Pro offerings), but the thought of the
sort of power this thing would consume if it becomes popular en masse makes me
shudder.

------
acangiano
Expect bugs and funny search/result pairs to show up in blogs soon. But this
is a great contribution to humanity.

------
Kibo
Didn't knew that something like that could be coded in Mathematica.

~~~
zackattack
Indeed, Wolfram himself once solved a Google puzzle (to encourage job
applicants) using Mathematica. It was, what's the pattern here, and what's the
next row?

1 11 21 1211 111221 312211

~~~
rincewind
Google is smart enough for this:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=1%2011%2021%201211%20111221%2...](http://www.google.com/search?q=1%2011%2021%201211%20111221%20312211)

~~~
tesseract
But why Google when you can OEIS?
<http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/>

~~~
zackattack
This is an awesome resource.

------
christofd
WOW, this made my day... this is AWESOME. Can't wait to try it out!!! I'll def
be watching the webcast.

------
Keyframe
I really hope this works good!

------
TweedHeads
The first question I'll ask WA is:

"What is the answer to life, the universe and everything"

Don't disappoint me...

~~~
rms
"Can entropy ever be reversed?"

~~~
rms
I'm actually going to be really disappointed if Alpha doesn't have the right
answer to this.

