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Wolfram Alpha’s New Data about Pokémon

blog.wolframalpha.com

21–30 of 61 posts

Re: Wolfram Alpha’s New Data about Pokémon

#21

The technology behind WolframAlpha is truly incredible. It's likely one of the most unvalued resources of our day.

... It's a parlor trick.

The computational complexity going on is minimal compared to the effort it takes to create and maintain the dataset. Accessing it with a formal query language is then straightforward.

The parlor trick is making the formal query language seem as informal and colloquial as possible. But fiddle with breaking it and you'll see you're just running searches on very specific and very specifically tagged data.

Edit: Having thought about it more, the reason it's 'underutilied' is that it's actually not that useful. Your knowledge of its dataset is more important than its ability to provide it for you--witness the person below who knew that it could provide nutrition information.

Your index on its information is better than its index, in other words.

Re: Wolfram Alpha’s New Data about Pokémon

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Bulbasaur is grass / poison type. Electric is not very effective against grass, so Bulbasaur will have an advantage unless Pikachu avoids using its electric attacks.

May have meant squirtle

Test

Re: Wolfram Alpha’s New Data about Pokémon

#23
I tried Xerneas (new legendary) but it is still in the process of researching. Also, for those who haven't played pokemon in a while, it's much more than just type match-ups, no matter what the anime leads you to think. There is much more strategy involved as it is a somewhat detailed RPG.

Re: Wolfram Alpha’s New Data about Pokémon

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Bulbasaur is grass / poison type. Electric is not very effective against grass, so Bulbasaur will have an advantage unless Pikachu avoids using its electric attacks.

IIRC, neither one has an advantage or disadvantage against the other. It'd actually be an even match! Edit: According to http://pokemondb.net/type , when Grass is attacking Electric, the attack is "normal," 100% of the damage takes. However, when Electric is attacking Grass, the attack is "not very effective," and only 50% of the damage takes. So Bulbasaur is totally going to win this.

[deleted]

Re: Wolfram Alpha’s New Data about Pokémon

#26
post #11

If only "pikachu versus bulbasaur" suggested the best strategy for each. :-D

Umm, that's a very unbalanced matchup, bulbasaur wins every time. Water > Electricity. If I recall, even a Raichu would lose to bulbasaur. Probably shouldn't be posting this. :P

A level 100 Raichu can kill a level 5 Bulbasaur using one Body Slam.

I wonder what Wolfram has to say about this...

Re: Wolfram Alpha’s New Data about Pokémon

#27

If only "pikachu versus bulbasaur" suggested the best strategy for each. :-D

I'm going to say Bulbasaur has the edge here. Pikachu has a pretty decent speed stat, but it doesn't have access to many worthwhile moves. Let's talk about the build you'd use to pretty decisively beat a Pikachu.

Pikachu's common passive ability 'Static' means that it can potentially inflict paralysis when hit with physical moves. On top of that, Bulbasaur has a fairly high Special Attack stat, so it'd be a good idea for it to use Special moves rather than Physical. On top of that Pokémon get a Same Type Attack Bonus (STAB) for using moves that match their type, so we want a non-physical Grass type move. 'Leaf Storm' is probably the best move we could use in this case. To get a Bulbasaur with that move, you have to do some breeding, but it's totally possible.

Now we'd also want to take advantage of Bulbasaur's own common ability, 'Overgrow', which boosts Grass type moves' effectiveness by 50% when it goes below 1/3 of its HP which, combined with our STAB means Grass type moves are now 200% as effective. Of course once we get our HP that low we're going to want to avoid taking much more damage. Using Bulbasaur's 'Sleep Powder' move at this point will cause Pikachu to fall asleep, preventing any further attacks.

So we've got our basic strategy, get down to 1/3 of our HP, put Pikachu to sleep and then wail on it with Leaf Storm. While we're letting our HP drop we could use something like 'Swords Dance' to boost our attack stat as well.

Re: Wolfram Alpha’s New Data about Pokémon

#28
It would be extremely cool if they'd expose information such as what moveset each Pokémon has available to them so I could make queries like 'what water type Pokémon that can learn Hydro Pump has the highest Special Attack stat'.

Re: Wolfram Alpha’s New Data about Pokémon

#29

The technology behind WolframAlpha is truly incredible. It's likely one of the most unvalued resources of our day.

yes and no. it's a tremendous amount of work to organize information and build associations between what you ask and what you get, although it certainly has a lot of gaps. it's also a neat way to look at how to combine information. that said it's within grasp of many of us: natural language interfaces (NLI) and SPARQL databases and endpoints. have a look at this semanticweb q&a: http://answers.semanticweb.com/questio…

Do you have any reference of wolframalpha using SPARQL? I don't think they are using similar things.
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