Wolfram Brain: Testing
The service Wolfram Alpha started recently. Event has been an awaited for a long time; OIL followed the development and predictions about it.
By definition, Wolfram Alpha is a search engine: it searches for information, based on the user request. Still, it is far from similar to the “classic” search engines, such as Google or Yahoo. Google would look for an already existing answer in the Internet. And if no one has ever answered it before, the user won’t find what he or she wants, even if thousands of “relevant” links will be given. Wolfram Alpha doesn’t search the Internet for an answer: it processes the request by itself, finding the answer on its own database. Therefore, the answer won’t have any links in it, it could consist out of just a few words or numbers. Another great difference is that Wolfram Alpha can deal with questions given in a “natural” language (i.e. in the way a question would be formulated, according to the norms of the English grammar).
All the statements above were given before the release of Wolfram Alpha. Now, when it is open to public, anyone can exploit use it. The writers of OIL decided to test the engine and see if it really is as great as it was described.
As a starter, easy questions were asked. Wolfram Alpha answered the question “How old is Barack Obama?” with an impressive accuracy, up to the day. The President of U.S. plays an extremely important role in world politics, but so does Russia’s President, Dimitry Medvedev. But when your author entered his name in the search bar, Wolfram had no idea who he was (and yes, she checked the spelling of his name several times). Taking a different approach, a search for “President of Russia” was made. Guess what the result was? You’re right, Dimitry Medvedev.
Next, an exploration on different countries was conducted. Another fun gag was found. Apparently, the literacy level of the U.S. (99.0%) is lower than Russia’s (99.4%) and Kazakhstan’s (99.5%). But no country would beat the small, but proud Caucasian nation of Georgia - 100% of its population is literate, according to Wolfram. Note that Georgia is one of the least economically developed former Soviet republics, and its President was mildly said stupid, by declaring war on Russia (to which he lost as a result not only his pride, but 2 large regions of the country as well).
The next step in the test were questions in “natural” language. The question “Where is the International Space Station tomorrow noon?” was answered (if you are interested, it will be somewhere over Pakistan, look yourself it you want the exact position). But “Where was the International Space Station yesterday noon?” is too complex for the system. Nevertheless, the request “International Space Station yesterday noon” gives the exact position. So who was said to know the human language…?
From the purely scientific perspective Wolfram Alpha turned out to be an excellent tool. Entering “caffeine vs. ethanol” one would get various charts and diagrams with chemical and physical properties of the 2 substances. An interesting fact noted from that page was that caffeine has a much lower lethal dosage (192 mg/kg) than ethanol (10,600 mg/kg). Kids, don’t drink coffee.
If you need help with math, Wolfram Alpha is a good place to go to: did you expect math flaws from the developers of Mathematica, the most successful mathematical software? Probably not. If you enter some math formula, you can be sure to get a graph, sometimes alternate forms of the expression (some get very obscure), derivatives, and antiderivatives (if they exist). Depending on the formula, other interesting things might pop up as well.
In conclusion, we can say that Wolfram Alpha was a daring project. It is a system with an engine that is unlike anything else on the Internet. But all systems have some kind of flaws, and this isn’t an exception. Self-advertising might be acceptable sometimes, but giving promises that can’t be held isn’t the best idea here. At least the engine is somehow working. But one thing is set for sure: Wolfram Alpha is not and never will be compatible with Google. In that way, it failed. Or as the small dictionary of Wolfram Alpha says, “flush it”.
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AlexAxe