
Wolfram - what is the speed of an unladen swallow? - dhotson
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+unladen+swallow
======
kurtosis
I'm very unimpressed - I had high hopes alas, here are some real queries from
my lab where google gives me the right answer within 1-2 links. (or I can
reach for the CRC handbook) W|A

Q: speed of light in glass A: c (speed of light) and small glasses are not
compatible

Q: magnetic moment of cobalt atom A: wolfram alpha isn't sure what to do with
your input

(note just "cobalt" has the information but you have to dig a little)

Q: band structure of bismuth A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your
input

Q: polarizability of sodium atom A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with
your input.

Q: dipole moment of water A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your
input.

Q: isotopes of copper A: good job! (this one actually gives me what I'm
looking for)

I just read it can do music so..

Q: bach A: has a very small amount of info and a cute timeline of birth and
death

<same for charles mingus, and ozzy osbourne>

Q: bach english suites A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

It's also really annoying that it does the HAL9000 thing like every other
query.

Nice effort - better luck next time. I'm sticking with the CRC handbook and
GOOG.

~~~
Silentio
By the HAL9000 thing, I assume you mean it does everything it can to protect
the integrity of its mission and attempts to kill the crew.

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zandorg
I have a theory... They're collecting queries made with the Alpha release, and
they'll just implement the suggestion (in a general form, like slurping up an
alcohol database in reply to someone's query complaint), and keep adding and
adding cases until it can handle 1000 times more specific queries.

~~~
anigbrowl
I don't think there is going be a Wolfram|Beta etc...although you're not the
only person to interpret 'alpha' like this.

~~~
cyberian
There already is: <http://wolframsbeta.com/> :D

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DarkShikari
...

Q: mass of five hydrogen atoms

A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

Q: distance traveled by space shuttle in one day

A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

Q: explosive energy of five sticks of dynamite

A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

Q: number of keys on a US keyboard

A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

Q: world war 2 deaths

A: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

...

~~~
bilbo0s
Just to be fair, I tried a couple of your queries with Google, and the answers
were not forthcoming either. But I suppose with Google I could do some SEO and
get the answers to show up. Whereas I am not sure how to do that with Wolfram.
Of course it only just came out.

The queries I tried were:

    
    
        Q:distance traveled by space shuttle in one day
        A:Lots of links, none of which gives canonical answer.
    
        Q:explosive energy of five sticks of dynamite
        A:Lots of links, only a few of which deal with dynamite the explosive.
    
        Query time was roughly 9:30 AM Central Time Sunday May 16, 2009.
    

Still, I think both Google and Wolfram will go to this model over time. Which,
of course, will be terrible for Google since revenue wise it is a one trick
pony. I think it will be better for us though. It does seem more natural for
me to ask for the population of Ningbo, and just get an answer instead of a
list of links.

~~~
nostrademons
I would've used very different queries to Google those:

    
    
      Q: [space shuttle speed]
      A: 17,500 mph
      Q: [17,500 * 24]
      A: 420,000
    

That took about 2 queries and 2 minutes - the first result for the space
shuttle's speed compared a bunch of sources, 3 of which were in agreement.

    
    
      Q: [dynamite explosive energy]
      A: 2.1 million joules
      Q: [2.1 * 5]
      A: 10.5 million joules
    

Wikipedia was the first result for that, with the answer right on the page
(and the text leading up to the answer in the snippet).

Curiously, _a lot_ of people do use full-sentence queries - perhaps it's the
lingering aftereffects of their 3rd grade teachers. If Wolfram Alpha can
handle those correctly, it'll be a big win. But other search engines have
tried - Ask.com is based around being able to ask questions in natural
language. And it never seems to work that way - computers don't seem to know
which of the many things you say are irrelevant.

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spectre
When I tried this I got the message:

    
    
      I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid
      I can't do that...
    
      Wolfram|Alpha has temporarily 
      exceeded its maximum test load.
    

Its appears that Wolfram Alpha is just HAL9000 in disguise.

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kwamenum86
I've seen a few comments write Wolfram Alpha off. WA is going to be 10 times
better than Google for a specific set of queries and when it gets etter at
recognizing questions (or when I get better at asking them since Wolfram is
infallible </sarcasm>) I can see myself using this thing IN ADDITION to
Google.

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jeremymims
How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Wolfram
Alpha says 3 (siding with the lying owl).

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+licks+does+it+...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+licks+does+it+take+to+get+to+the+center+of+a+tootsie+pop%3F)

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sfphotoarts
Everybody is trying to use W|A as though it's Orac (Blakes7) but this is an
NLP layer (not a particularly impressive one, it seems) atop a calculating
encyclopedia. When it is able to latch on to some encyclopedic value it is
able to make calculations with it. At first glance it seems useful for
scientists, however, they already have much more domain specific and
sophisticated models that they are already using. For example, knowing where
the ISS is relative yo my location, for anyone that this matters to, they
already have the software, for the rest of us its little more than a novelty.
For the average person the data is not accessible enough unless you learn to
speak its language.

Its another Powerset, trying to provide more accessible pathways to data
tables. NLP seems to be a very tough nut to crack because Powerset is
embarrassingly poor at this (despite some very clever people working on the
problem) and W|A follows in their footsteps. Given sufficient data and much
better parsing of that data this could be useful. Comparing it to Google is
pointless because Google is a search engine, and W|A is not. W|A is a
knowledge retrieval engine. CIA World Factbook on steroids.

I think the project should get government funding, expand the datasets
dramatically and it will become another way to lookup facts and perform
calculations on those facts. A useful tool for people in their everyday lives,
but the sophistication needs to exponentially expand to have 'everyday
usefulness', for example, if I can do queries like 'trend crime rates in San
Francisco by neighborhood', or, 'aggregate opinions on canon 5dII, summarize'
etc.

We are looking at something very primitive, but the concept is one very worthy
of further research. When we figure a way for data models on any topic to be
represented in a consistent and universally accessible format (akin to what
Wikipedia is as a human NLP level) and these nuggets be shared such that an
engine like W|A can process them we will really be on to something...

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byrneseyeview
<http://xkcd.com/16/>

W|A is an attempt to let us query all of human knowledge the way we query our
own memories. And the best use of it is to see if it also likes Monty Python?

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physcab
Why is everyone comparing Google to Wolfram Alpha? Google is a 10 year old
company! I wonder what answers Google served up on Day 2...

~~~
ShabbyDoo
Didn't Google launch with little fanfare? Like Cuil, Alpha's pre-launch hype
set high expectations. If Wolfram had said, "Hey, we're trying out something
interesting and new...far from perfect, but we want to let people try it out
and get some feedback"....then these comments would all be, "Gee wiz! Look at
this idea they had for music stuff..."

~~~
physcab
Yah but at the same time, they never explicitly said you'd be able to do
things with WA that you couldn't do with Google.

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msie
Try this one:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=answer+to+life%2C+the+u...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=answer+to+life%2C+the+universe+and+everything)

~~~
ekiru
Can it compute the question, though? If not, that's merely cool but useless.
Most of the people who would think to ask that already know the answer. It's
the question that we need to know(My vote goes to "What do you get if you
multiply six by seven?").

------
J_McQuade
_"Input interpretation: how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck
could chuck wood?

Result: a woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could chuck if a woodchuck
could chuck wood

(according to the tongue-twister)"_

That was actually surprisingly helpful, as I've never heard the second part!
And now I know.

[edit]

 _"Input interpretation: how many roads must a man walk down before you can
call him a man? (etc.)

Result: the answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind (according to Bob
Dylan)"_

They've thought of everything!

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asimjalis
Yet it seems to know the speed of an unladen European swallow:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+an+unladen+eur...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+an+unladen+european+swallow)

It's not as sure about unladen African swallows though.

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+an+unladen+afr...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+an+unladen+african+swallow)

------
magoghm
September 11, 2001 <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=september+11%2C+2001>
Death of Mohammed Atta (terrorist)

------
vlad
Try typing in the name of a college (the abbreviation is fine, too.) It's also
interesting that it can not only perform integration, but also tell you the
steps it took to get to the answer.

~~~
nop
Despite all the misses I'm pretty impressed it knew about my university
<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=University+of+Skövde> at all,
considering it's tiny even by Swedens standards.

------
Tangurena
This has some calculations showing the speed of a swallow:

<http://www.style.org/unladenswallow/>

The speed calculations are based on the Strouhal number
<http://www.style.org/strouhalflight/>

<http://www.style.org/unladenswallow/theories/>

------
agotterer
Hah! That was the first query I made when trying out Wolfram. I'm sure they
were prepared for some of the popular, "expected" queries. Overall though, I
found most of my queries to return no results. Most of them were based on
similar queries to the screen cast. Its an interesting product and I look
forward to seeing it improve.

------
weavejester
Interestingly, Google manages to do a better job for that particular question:

[http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=speed+of+an+unladen+swallow...](http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=speed+of+an+unladen+swallow&btnI)

Though to be fair, I don't think Wolfram had unladen swallows in mind for
Alpha.

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irrelative
I think we all know the answer to:

<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=meaning+of+life>

I guess they knew their audience enough to answer the obvious questions.

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resdirector
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=who+owns+wolfram+resear...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=who+owns+wolfram+research%3F)

------
thomasfl
Live stream of the control room <http://www.justin.tv/clip/2dd6b9f07e7f8a4e>

------
kmavm
<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=VMware>

'Interpreting "VMware" as "voxware"'

------
richardw
I asked it "tallest building in the world" and it wasn't sure. I figure they
just need to up the universe of stuff it knows.

------
cubicle67
western australia

hmm.. thinks I want the flight time between Western, New York and Australia
(19 hours 5 minutes if anyone's interested)

Every geographical location I've tried keeps giving me a us equivalent one :(

But, it's early days yet and this is a long term project. Can't wait to see
what this is capable of in a year

~~~
nop
In constrast "Is God Real" Says it only takes 2 hours and 35 minutes betwee
God, hungrary and Real, portugal. :)
<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Is+God+real%3F>

------
TweedHeads
"Can entropy ever be reversed?"

Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

~~~
pbiggar
I think this might be the best short story I've ever read.

<http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm>

------
erlanger
<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ruby+vs+python>

~~~
paulgb
At least it knows that python has a faster runtime.

------
Allocator2008
Could somebody please tell me why the f2k we care how fast some random bird
can fly? Why the swallow? Why not the bald eagle? Or the chickadee? Who gives
a f2k.

~~~
jibiki
The great thing about the internet: when you don't get an inside joke, you can
just google it.

[http://www.google.com/search?q=airspeed+velocity+unladen+swa...](http://www.google.com/search?q=airspeed+velocity+unladen+swallow&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-
US:unofficial&client=firefox-a)

Second link.

