Wolfram|Alpha

[lethargic_man]

I just had a look at the online demo of this, and was very impressed.

I then read the comments on a BBC blog post about it, and was astonished by how many people wrote it off as useless because it couldn't make sense of their questions, or answered them wrongly. Doesn't anyone understand what "alpha" means, and appreciate that this is a work in progress? They're all saying they'd do better with Google, but I can be sure Google would have been as flakey at a similar stage of progress...

Comments

[liv]

Hmmm. While I would expect something in alpha not to be working completely properly yet, this thing has been released with a whole lot of fanfare. And some of the problems people are running into, where they repeat one of the sample questions with just the noun changed and get "can't understand the question", lead to the suspicion that the demo is just a thin veneer of a very small database of questions with preprepared answers. So the guy who's touting it can ask some complicated mathematical or demographic question and wow the audience with an informative, relevant answer. But the thing isn't actually answering real questions in real time. That's cynical, though; it will be interesting to see how it develops, definitely.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I think that's way overly cynical. For a start, if that had been the case, he'd have been a fool to have released it to the public to play with.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Alpha, to me, means that it ought to work in principle, and it's nowhere near working enough for me to make any judgement about it; it's just lacking not just actual knowledge, but I felt that the underlying principle was weak.

I looked at the sample questions ' 'five biggest countries' and asked it half a dozen variations of 'five countries least rainfall.' Eventually, I managed to get it to spit out 'wettest place' but 'wettest place Britain' got me 'I can't do anything with this' again - and I want it to recognise the nature of the question.