{"id":1152,"date":"2009-05-16T17:18:30","date_gmt":"2009-05-17T00:18:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/?p=1152"},"modified":"2009-05-16T17:18:30","modified_gmt":"2009-05-17T00:18:30","slug":"wolframalpha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/2009\/05\/wolframalpha\/","title":{"rendered":"Wolfram|Alpha"},"content":{"rendered":"

I spent a few minutes playing with Wolfram|Alpha<\/a> today, its first full day of public availability. While the launch of this service was very recent,\u00a0Wolfram|Alpha has a longer history than you might think. It’s built off of Mathematica, which I never used as a student but I certainly heard about from my math-loving friends. Mathematica was released over 20 years ago and\u00a0named by Steve Jobs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At first glance, Wolfram|Alpha looks like a traditional search engine, but it’s different than the types of search engines you’re used to associating with a web service.<\/p>\n

It strives to provide answers to factual queries based on data visualization and computation. Yeah, I don’t think I explained it well either. Let’s just jump to some sample queries to show what I mean. I’m pretty bad at calculating time, so let’s have computers tell me the answers:<\/p>\n

How much longer until my birthday? (my first query!)
\n[days until dec 31, 2009<\/a>]<\/p>\n

How much time do I have to ride my bike? I don’t have a bike light.
\n[time until sunset<\/a>] or just [sunset<\/a>]<\/p>\n

When is this 87-minute movie going to be over if I start watching at 7:15?
\n[7:15 + 87 minutes<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Here’s the first query I tried which didn’t work. I wanted to see if I could add up times (in MM:SS format) to see how much video I’ve uploaded to YouTube. I put in these sample values:
\n[4:15 + 2:10 + 18:37<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Bummer. But with a little bit of find\/replace I could get an input that Wolfram|Alpha understood:
\n[4 minutes 15 seconds + 2 minutes 10 seconds + 18 minutes 37 seconds<\/a>]<\/p>\n

I entered all of those queries with limited knowledge about what types of questions Wolfram|Alpha could answer, and had no idea what a correct syntax should look like. Fortunately, it does a pretty good idea of understanding what I’m trying to ask, which is what’s expected of search engines today. After I played around with time-based computation, I tried a couple of other queries:<\/p>\n

[population of doylestown, pa and population of sunnyvale, ca<\/a>]<\/p>\n

This one did not work:
\n[populations of doylestown, pa and sunnyvale, ca in 1983<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Here’s a fun one that I originally learned from Google’s calculator:
\n[number of horns on a unicorn<\/a>]<\/p>\n

And this one from Monty Python:
\n[velocity of an unladen swallow<\/a>]<\/p>\n

As you can see, the results are better when you’re more specific:
\n[velocity of an unladen european swallow<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Those should be enough to get you started, but if you need more inspiration or are looking for more diverse examples, check out this list<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent a few minutes playing with Wolfram|Alpha today, its first full day of public availability. While the launch of this service was very recent,\u00a0Wolfram|Alpha has a longer history than you might think. It’s built off of Mathematica, which I never used as a student but I certainly heard about from my math-loving friends. Mathematica … Continue reading Wolfram|Alpha<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}