Random Acts of Mind by Dones

If you haven’t already heard, Stephen Wolfram (the creator of the uber-graphing calculator software Mathematica) has recently launched a knowledge engine (as opposed to a search engine like the Google) called Wolfram|Alpha. Instead of being sent out to the internet wasteland as we’re used to, once you type in a query in WolframAlpha the site brings the data to you. In this respect I would categorize it closer to Wikipedia than Ask.com. But Wikipedia it isn’t. The folks at Twit.tv described W|A as “the CIA Factbook on steroids plus a kickass graphing calculator”. Given that the basis of the algorithm is Mathematica’s symbolic language, I think this is probably the best description we’ll get, until we figure out what to do with the darn thing.

That’s really the problem. Mashable does have a list of WolframAlpha easter eggs (also try entering ’hello world’) which are truly awesome from a pop-culture standpoint, but not really the computation knowledge that W|A is promising. It won’t answer ‘How many boroughs in new york city?’ or ‘teenage mothers in 2000′. A query of ‘population of West Germany in 1957′ returns nothing but a suggestion to retry ‘Germany in 1957′, to which it then ignores the year and provides current data for the nation. So maybe I went back in time to far: ‘population of Germany 1990′ provides a data point (79.4 million people) and plots it on a graph with data since 1970. What if I give it two data points, then, and ask the big calculator in the cloud to find the net change? Alas, querying ‘(population of Germany 2000) minus (population of Germany 1990)’ returns ‘(82.31 million people) Subtract[79.43 million people]‘, which is all too small of a step away from being what I would call ‘powerful computational knowledge’. Perhaps I didn’t use the correct syntax, but honestly, for this to work, I shouldn’t really need to bend my query to the esoteric whims of the Mathematica code. The correct syntax, by the way, is apparently ‘population germany 2000 – population germany 1990′, returning a useful answer of ’2.876 million people’.

So then I ask myself the question, “What would I want WolframAlpha to know?” The simple answer is ‘everything’, but that’s not fair. So below are a few questions I’d like to be able to ask a giant computer programmed by a genius. I welcome commenters to add the questions they’d really like to ask WolframAlpha, if it were everything we want it to be.

1 – Aggregates, like ‘How many cities are named Springfield?’ or ‘How many Main Streets in the USA?’
2 – Blue-sky sorts of questions, like ‘How much money would I need to start a new auto insurance company?’ or ‘How much fuel would a traditional rocket need to take a Voyager-sized satellite to the nearest neighboring star system?’
3 – Future events, like ‘What will be the next 10 years when Christmas Day falls on a Sunday?’ or ‘What is the current payoff date for the US National Debt?’

Okay, maybe that last one isn’t fair, either. but now I put it to you: What other questions would you like to ask WolframAlpha? Please add your comment.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Internet, Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.