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Wolfram Alpha: Our First Impressions

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Re: Wolfram Alpha: Our First Impressions

#11

Post by frig »

est wrote: post #9
zackattack wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I always find these puzzles odd Why can't this row be valid? 1 11 21 1211 111221 312211 1 11 21 1211 111221 312211 1 11 21 1211 111221 312211 .... Why does it have to be 13112221? Is it just a most close answer according to average math pupil's knowledge model psychologically?

Yeah, the "next # in the sequence" things are in theory dubious but in practice the theoretical unsoundness doesn't really cause issues (in the sense that: the people you'd want to select for will often find the pattern you want them to find, and many of the people you want to select against won't find that pattern).

The real meaning of what they're asking for is something like:

- I assert that there's a simple-but-nontrivial "algorithm" that generates this sequence. Find that algorithm, and use it to find the "next number in the sequence".

...but then you need a definition of "trivial", which is a lot of work (and most applicants know "trivial" when they see it:

  def sequence(i): return [1,11,21,1211,111221, 312211][i % 5]
...is "trivial", so why bother explaining it that way when most applicants already "know" that's the wrong answer?

Doing a more-formal definition probably gets you into issues of Komolgorov complexity, which most applicants will not know much about.

Re: Wolfram Alpha: Our First Impressions

#14

Post by 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.

Re: Wolfram Alpha: Our First Impressions

#16

Post by 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.

Re: Wolfram Alpha: Our First Impressions

#17

Post by ComputerGuru »

TweedHeads wrote: post #15

The first question I'll ask WA is: "What is the answer to life, the universe and everything" Don't disappoint me...

I'd ask it for the perfect recipe for a decent mug of tea. It'll hold up WA's severs for months on end, causing unmaskable interrupt that won't return until I get my tea.

Re: Wolfram Alpha: Our First Impressions

#19

Post by zackattack »

tesseract wrote: post #10
rincewind wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is smart enough for this: http://www.google.com/search?q=1%2011%2021%201211%20111221%2...

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

This is an awesome resource.

Re: Wolfram Alpha: Our First Impressions

#20

Post by zackattack »

alain94040 wrote: post #14

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.

Quoting Wikipedia is not respectable in an academic context because you are not quoting a primary source, or even a secondary source. You are typically quoting a tertiary or quaternary source. If the article is properly cited, however, it is not difficult to simply quote the original citation.
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