Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Wolfram Alpha: A Logic Named (After) Tungsten?

For all that its name sounds like an asteroid base -- or a software company's internal codename -- Wolfram|Alpha is the darnedest unsearch engine ("Computational Knowledge Engine") I've seen. It'll solve differential equations (and show its work) and can give a good answer to "How hot is it?" Bing and Siri are both said to ring it up when they get in over their heads. --And it has its own gift shop.

You're on your own about the T-shirts, coffee mugs and hoodies but you might like to try the Thing Itself, next time the Usual Search Suspects are struggling to make sense of whatever it was you were looking for.

(Title refers, somewhat obliquely, to A Logic Named Joe, the first science fiction story about The Internet, by the underrated but brilliant Murray Leinster. It would only confuse you to add that he wrote it in 1946.)
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9 comments:

  1. BobGFebruary 7, 2012 at 9:43 AM

    I read a lot of Leinster as a youngster during the late fifties and early sixties; he was underrated at the time.

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  2. NorthFebruary 7, 2012 at 9:54 AM

    I've used Wolfram's Mathematica for years. I'll bet Alpha feeds it.

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  3. karrdeFebruary 7, 2012 at 10:25 AM

    I've known of Wolfram!Alpha for a few years.

    Just the other day, I needed a value for a medium-large combinatorial. (How many ways are there for 20 people to stand in a line? I knew it was big, but Alpha gave me the number. It's in the ballpark of 2.4 x 10^18, which was most of what I needed.)

    Definitely a useful tool.

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  4. DrangFebruary 7, 2012 at 12:20 PM

    Murray Leinster was also an early libertarian SF author. If I was going to survey a hostile planet for colonization, I definitely think I'd ant a trio of friendly, intelligent gene-modded Kodiaks to help...

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  5. Dave HFebruary 7, 2012 at 2:42 PM

    karrde: What kind of query did you use? Google and Bing can both do (20!) and get the number, but being able to ask in something resembling English would be more impressive.

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  6. mikelaforgeFebruary 8, 2012 at 12:40 AM

    Try "planes overhead" or "scrabble"

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  7. JerryFebruary 8, 2012 at 6:53 AM

    Many of Mr. Leinster's works are available in public domain from OPDS catalogs like Feedbooks & Manybooks. Gutenberg is also worth a search as well.

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  8. karrdeFebruary 8, 2012 at 9:48 AM

    @Dave H, that notation is actually the shortest.

    I'd not even tried Google or Bing...and I can't tell what that means.

    @Roberta, I am not that surprised that sci-fi got this idea so long ago. I think I'll add that one to my list of classic sci-fi to read.

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  9. Ian ArgentFebruary 10, 2012 at 11:44 AM

    A logic named Joe is in one of the Baen Free Library books, I believe.

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