Wolfram Alpha Gets Its First Update
Wolfram Alpha, the 'computational knowledge engine' from the makers of Mathematica, received its first major update today. According to Wolfram, this is the first broad update to the core code and data of Alpha since its launch, and includes a number of refinements to the way Alpha handles certain types of data and queries. Specifically, these refinements include combined time series plots of different quantities ("germany gdp vs population"), additional linguistic forms of many types of data and questions, and a number of updates to Alpha's data set, so that it now knows more about planets, foods, and government positions, for example. In total, the team touched about 1.1 million data values in this update and made 1,850 code commits.
Become an Alpha Tester
The Wolfram Alpha team will also make the latest version of its updates available for a limited number of outside testers before it goes live. If you would like to become a test for Wolfram Alpha, you can sign up here.
Here is a more complete list of updates:
- Additional linguistic forms for many types of data and questions
- More comparisons of composite properties (e.g. "US military vs. UK")
- Combined time series plots of different quantities (e.g. "germany gdp vs population")
- More complete handling of government positions (e.g. "chancellor", etc.)
- Updates to country borders for India, China, Slovenia, Croatia, and others
- Updates to naming for certain politically sensitive countries and regions
- Additional subcountry regions (e.g. "Wales"); many more to come
- Additional support for current and past fractional timezones (e.g. "Iran time")
- City-by-city handling of U.S. states with multiple timezones
- Updates to certain European currencies (e.g. for "Cyprus" and "Slovakia")
- Some additional historical events; many more to come
- Additional probability computations for cards and coins (e.g. "2 or 3 aces")
- Additional output for partitions of integers (e.g. "partitions of 47")
- Implicit handling of geometric figure properties (e.g. "ellipse with area 6 and major axis 2")
- Additional support for Mathematica 3D graphics syntax
- Additional support for stock prices with explicit dates
- Support for planet-to-planet distances and "nearest planet", etc.
- Extra information when comparing incompatible units (e.g. "ergs vs. newtons")
- Improved linguistic handling for many foods (e.g. "love apple")
- More mountains added, especially in Australia
- Support for many less-common given names (e.g. "zebulon")
- More "self-aware" questions answered (e.g. "how old are you")
- More consistent handling of sidebar links to Wikipedia, etc.
Are You Using Alpha?
When we first reviewed Wolfram Alpha in early May, we gave it a mixed review, based on how uneven its search results were when looking at some topics outside of the engineering and live sciences. Alpha got a lot of hype before and right after its launch, but things have been relatively quiet since then. According to Compete, which just uploaded its data for May today, Alpha had around 1.5 million unique visitors last month (as always, we recommend you take these numbers with a grain of salt). We will have to wait and see, of course, how many of these visitors just went to the site out of curiosity and how many will become loyal users.
Have you gone back to using Alpha after the initial release, or are you waiting for a better version to come around? Let us know in the comments.
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Since first using Wolfram when it was released, I've gone back to it a few times. Something it does really well is distill information. If you know exactly what you're looking for, you'll often find it. For example, I was looking for circulation data about a newspaper. Instead of scouring the Web looking for it, I just typed it in and up it came. It's got a long ways to go, but there's no where to go from here but up.
Ben said...
It's got a long ways to go...
Yep, that correct. WA's knowledge-based database is only going to grow over time. The more knowledge it acquires, the better its retrieval are. This is the main difference between a retrieval system that needs to acquire knowledge for its inference engine to work on (WolframAlpha) and one that doesn't (Google). Cuil failed because it has only a single market, which it competes with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are in. WA is in a different domain. Their market is huge, varying from medical decision support systems (yep, they can sign up hospitals, clinics, general practitioner physicians, etc...), corporate knowledge database, schools, tertiary institutions, etc,...
Watch out for the next few years, when WA starts panning out its knowledge engine to other specific domains.
Haven't gone anywhere - still use alpha (from day one) for anything numerical or to do with hard data.
things alpha is really good at
math homework - at any level
scientific queries
geographical queries
numerical comparisons
computation
not so good for the rest yet
but for an interesting use try 'random integer' as a query. and keep retrying it
There was a lot of hype about how it would compete with Google. When I first tried Wolfram, I didn't see any comparison. Not that one is better, just completely different. Anxious to see how the wolf evolves.
Gave it a fail.
Tried it on something I thought would be relatively straight-forward:
Land area of earth divided by estimate of current world population.
Couldn't find a way for it to grasp the question.
My 2c: Definitely using it and will continue to do so.
I've been using it for some quick facts and for some mathematical and astronomical computations.
I don't think any comparison to Google is in place yet - Wolfram Alpha's knowledge base & inference engine would have to go a long way for such a comparison to be even relevant.
Even so, while I don't know what are Wolfram's plans regarding monetization, I sure hope for them they do not rely on major crowds coming to their site. Like Falafulu Fisi has mentioned - creating a market of knowledge-supported decision systems, e.g. medical systems, makes much more sense here. And for such an innovative product, it makes sense to first launch it on the Internet, have some hype going on, and only then address the tough-cookie organizations.
No comparison to Google but useful for some research paper.
this site perfect, thanks
Even so, while I don't know what are Wolfram's plans regarding monetization, I sure hope for them they do not rely on major crowds coming to their site. Like Falafulu Fisi has mentioned - creating a market of knowledge-supported decision systems, e.g. medical systems, makes much more sense here. And for such an innovative product, it makes sense to first launch it on the Internet, have some hype going on, and only then address the tough-cookie organizations.
I have tried it. It is different kind search engine because the information there is brief and clear. It gives very fast answers to your questions.
Great search engine.
but for an interesting use try 'random integer' as a query. and keep retrying it
Even so, while I don't know what are Wolfram's plans regarding monetization, I sure hope for them they do not rely on major crowds coming to their site. Like Falafulu Fisi has mentioned astalavista
them they do not rely on major crowds coming to their site. Like Falafulu Fisi has mentioned astalavista
the them they do not rely on major crowds coming to their site. Like Falafulu Fisi has mentioned thank you admin
them they do not rely on major crowds coming to their site. Like Falafulu Fisi has mentioned
*them they do not rely on major crowds coming to their site. Like Falafulu Fisi has mentioned
them they do not rely on major crowds coming to their site. Like Falafulu Fisi has mentioned