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.)
I read a lot of Leinster as a youngster during the late fifties and early sixties; he was underrated at the time.
ReplyDeleteI've used Wolfram's Mathematica for years. I'll bet Alpha feeds it.
ReplyDeleteI've known of Wolfram!Alpha for a few years.
ReplyDeleteJust 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.
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...
ReplyDeleteWow. Insightful story. Apropos segue. Thanks for the reference.
ReplyDeletekarrde: 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.
ReplyDeleteTry "planes overhead" or "scrabble"
ReplyDeleteMany of Mr. Leinster's works are available in public domain from OPDS catalogs like Feedbooks & Manybooks. Gutenberg is also worth a search as well.
ReplyDelete@Dave H, that notation is actually the shortest.
ReplyDeleteI'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.
A logic named Joe is in one of the Baen Free Library books, I believe.
ReplyDelete