Saturday, May 16, 2009

Wolfram Alpha. Fail?

1. It can't answer, with any degreee of precision, "How much wood could a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"

2. All of the answers are pictures. This means you can't cut and paste in any useful sense. Probably good for 9th graders trying to write a report. Bad for other things.

3. The Matt pointed out this "synonym network" for "homosexuality:"



I don't understand it either.

I think #2 is the more interesting part of Wolfram Alpha. I mean, why? Yes, there is a lot of graphical stuff, but there is also a lot of non-graphical stuff. It wouldn't be that hard to write a set of routines that rendered it in HTML. The only reasons I can come up with basically revolve around "Our data is soooo especialle that we need to keep it safe." Odd.

1 Comments:

Blogger jimpurdy1943@yahoo.com said...

I've had some fun playing with it, but I don't expect to us it anytime soon in place of my old favorites, Google Web Search, Google News Search, and Google Blog Search. My high-tech sons and my engineer brother might use it more than I will.

8:59 PM  

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