PDA

View Full Version : WOLFRAM|ALPHA a near starTrek computer for free



zak
25-05-2009, 16:28
hello
you can't believe it until you see it,
WolframAlpha free from wolfram co. the authors of famous mathematica program,
launched recently in 15 may 2009. it is the first glimpse of the future star trek intellegent computer.
the site is http://www.wolframalpha.com/
from the Faq's :
Is Wolfram|Alpha a search engine?
No. It's a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.
ask any question like red + yellow it will give you orange and a whole another info.
other examples:
pi to 1000 digits
219 to binary
plot x^2+y^2<1 and y>x
size of the earth

and any question you want, for examples click on the examples in the top of the site page

a 13 minute description video describing it by wolfram himself:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Petr Schreiber
25-05-2009, 19:47
Hi Zak,

yes, it is quite powerful. I think the future of this tool is in combination with voice command - it is little clumsy to type some queries, but speak them would be very natural.

We discussed this tool here (http://community.thinbasic.com/index.php?topic=2673.0) a bit.

zak
26-05-2009, 07:36
Hi Petr , today i have tried :
factors of 123456789
and it gives me the factors of this number,do not forget you can download the results as pdf doc by clicking at a button on the bottom, but in my second question i have gotten the following:
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that..."
Wolfram|Alpha has temporary exceeded its current maximun load. Please try again soon"
so they needs more computing power, a 10000 cpu cores and two connected supercomputers are not enough to millions of questions from all over the world, i wish they cooperate with google, since google have billions of dollars, while the maths people are always poor.
regards

jack
26-05-2009, 09:48
zak, you may already know this but in case you don't, you can get the Maxima CAS for free http://maxima.sourceforge.net/
when installing select the checkbox Create XMaxima desktop icon as I find the XMaxima interface easier,
you can also get OpenAxiom http://www.open-axiom.org/ but you only get a console interface.