Wolfram Alpha - Join the 0.1 Percent

[Vulcan]

Have you heard about Wolfram|Alpha? It sounds like a secret society of zoologists, but it's actually a very cool search engine that can answer natural language questions by crunching data, numbers and a little secret sauce. Here's the scoop on what you can do with Wolfram|Alpha...

I just started looking at it but it seems you can ask it to solve any factual problem.

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[CampbellsTransgressions]

Engineering student here. Yes. All of the calculus assignments I've had over the last two semesters have been online and you would have to complete the whole 3-4 hour long assignment before having it graded. They gave you 7 chances to ace the assignment. It's just easier to use Wolfram Alpha to check your answers before submitting instead of having to do the assignment over and over.

Showed it to the president of the company I'm working at over the summer. He was impressed with how it will put anything into a proper format. Wolfram Alpha will do all the unit analysis you could ever want (except barrels of oil). Just throw the numbers in with their units and it will convert them for you before it solves the equation. It's brilliant.

[pylon]

Isn't this thing the backbone of Siri?

[SebC]

I asked it what the longest winning streak in the NHL was, and it gave me the orbit of a satellite.

[Vulcan]

Originally Posted by pylon

Isn't this thing the backbone of Siri?

from the article

Microsoft Bing uses it to power some queries, and you'll find answers provided by Wolfram|Alpha showing up in Apple's Siri app. In fact, Siri now accounts for about 25% of all queries processed by Wolfram|Alpha.

Read more: http://askbobrankin.com/wolfram_alph...#ixzz1wKkg7Pur

[kirant]

Originally Posted by CampbellsTransgressions

Engineering student here. Yes. All of the calculus assignments I've had over the last two semesters have been online and you would have to complete the whole 3-4 hour long assignment before having it graded. They gave you 7 chances to ace the assignment. It's just easier to use Wolfram Alpha to check your answers before submitting instead of having to do the assignment over and over.

I've found it in a similar manner. My first year matrices class had a similar structure (3 chances at getting it right) and Wolfram Alpha was used to simplify long questions or invert things we didn't feel like inverting. Most of the class has been using it for whatever we need to get done on assignments that are long and complicated.

[sclitheroe]

Welcome to 2009...wow



Cool fact of the day: when Wolfram Alpha launched their original iPhone app, which is the same as the current one, it cost the then unheard of sum of $50. It was one of the most expensive apps available at the time.

[kirant]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Welcome to 2009...wow

It does floor me though that 0.1% use it given the massive increase in general knowledge it has gained in the last couple years.

[Mathalete]

I'm creating an online high school mathematics course for the province of Manitoba and use the site a fair bit as a resource for students for regression, finding zeroes, etc. It's a very slick website.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by kirant

It does floor me though that 0.1% use it given the massive increase in general knowledge it has gained in the last couple years.

I just wolfram'ed "number of internet users * 0.01", and got 20 million. Considering Instagram has an estimated 40 million person user base, that's pretty respectable. Wolfram Alpha may be a generalized knowledge computation thing, but its still heavily skewed towards science and math.

Mathematica, Wolfram's leading product, is estimated to have 2 million users, although that's an app, and a specialized one, at that.

[Bigtime]

Type in "flights overhead" to see aircraft in the area of your current geoIP location. It will give you the flight numbers, height, and slant distance from your location.

[Leon]

There was a TED talk from Stephen Wolfram about the capability of this software. Used it my whole last year in Econ with my 300 level dynamic math classes. It's awesome.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Welcome to 2009...wow



Cool fact of the day: when Wolfram Alpha launched their original iPhone app, which is the same as the current one, it cost the then unheard of sum of $50. It was one of the most expensive apps available at the time.

I am actually pretty sure I used Wolfram Alpha to double check my Calculus stuff back in 2005. I could be mistaken and am blocking out some other time I needed to calculate integrals due to trauma.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Rathji

I am actually pretty sure I used Wolfram Alpha to double check my Calculus stuff back in 2005. I could be mistaken and am blocking out some other time I needed to calculate integrals due to trauma.

It was definitely 2009:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i...ha+launch+date

Calculus trauma is an accepted reason though

[TorqueDog]

WolframAlpha is a wicked program. Really like it.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i...z.+of+water%3F

[ShaolinFlame]

Being able to iterate fractals is pretty cool...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i...hSnowflake.n_2