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Wolfram - what is the speed of an unladen swallow?

wolframalpha.com

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Re: Wolfram - what is the speed of an unladen swallow?

#31

Post by ekiru »

msie wrote: post #2

Try this one: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=answer+to+life%2C+the+u...

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?").

Re: Wolfram - what is the speed of an unladen swallow?

#34

Post by 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...

Re: Wolfram - what is the speed of an unladen swallow?

#36

Post by 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.

Re: Wolfram - what is the speed of an unladen swallow?

#40

Post by jibiki »

Allocator2008 wrote: post #38

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.

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...

Second link.

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