Wolfram Alpha Blog

It's not misleading at all --hinging on a literal reading of that quote is just disingenuous. For the record, further down that blog post[1], Wolfram writes (emphasis added): "So what does it all mean? I think it's pretty important, because it really changes the whole process --and economics-- of programming. I've even seen it quite dramatically within our own company. As the Wolfram Language and the Wolfram Programming Cloud have been coming together, there've been more and more places where we've been able to use them internally. And each time, it's been amazing to see programming tasks that used to take weeks or months suddenly get done in days or less." How is that not a very concrete claim about the product? [1] http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2014/06/23/wolfram-programming-cloud-is-l…

I'm glad to see other people working on this problem. We (Wolfram|Alpha) are doing this too, starting out with the making the 'easy cases' nearly automatic. Here's a blog-post describing our effort: http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2012/02/09/launching-a-democratization-of… You can also play around with our examples without having to sign up to Wolfram|Alpha Pro. My favorite is an automatic analysis of the Titanic data that nicely illustrates that while the motto "women and children first" applied, being rich certainly helped: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=+&examplefile=1&datasetfi… We cover other kinds of simple analysis and visualization too, like heat maps, Venn diagrams, graphs, and so on. As always, feedback welcome.

There are many applications... http://www.usereffect.com/topic/5-useful-uses-for-wolfram-alpha http://mashable.com/2009/05/19/wolfram-alpha-better-than-google/ http://blog.wolframalpha.com/

> Takes about 5-20 seconds to load a page on my 1Gb fiber connection Wolfram Alpha is implemented in Mathematica, which --- to understate the situation --- was never intended as a high performance backend server language. I suspect that's the reason for the bad performance. "As a result, the five million lines of Mathematica code that make up Wolfram|Alpha are equivalent to many tens of millions of lines of code in a lower-level language like C, Java, or Python." [1] Sure, there's something to be said for implementing logic in high-level code, but without a plan for lowering that high-level logic to machine code in a way that performs well, you're setting yourself up for long-term pain. [1] https://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/01/the-secret-behind-the-computa…

Wolfram|Alpha for iOS suports image input from camera[1] and has a TextRecognize function[2]. Has anybody tested it? [1] http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2012/03/14/wolframalpha-app-for-ios-adds-… [2] http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/TextRecognize.html

Lots of number crunching. There are very simple transfers they could do like the Hohmann transfer. Realistically, the mass of the comet is so small, and conservation of fuel is so important that they are probably doing a significantly more complicated transfer that utilizes the gravity of other orbital bodies to slingshot the lander. Some wikipedia pages you may find interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network Ideally they would have an orbit that would have a really low intercept velocity, so the deceleration burns would require the least amount of fuel possible. Once they get close, they burn to get into a stable orbit around the comet. I found one article covering the math behind the deceleration orbit: http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2014/08/04/rosetta-first-mission-to-orbit…

I wonder if this could be used in conjunction with Wolfram's new project, mentioned yesterday. http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2013/11/13/something-very-big-is-coming-o…

Just found this thanks to a late night diff eq. problem set: http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2013/04/01/introducing-the-wolframalpha-h…

Wolfram|Alpha Handwritten Knowledge Engine: http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2013/04/01/introducing-the-wolframalpha-h…

Here is the Wolfram|Alpha announcement: http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2011/04/18/wolframalpha-and-duckduckgo-pa…

Wolfram|Alpha have changed their name: http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2011/04/01/wolframalpha-changes-its-name/ Now it's: http://www.wolframalpha.com/bieberbeta.html WolframAlpa|Beta would have been funnier in my opinion. This just feels like my dad trying to be hip.

Glad to see they learned from their previous pricing, http://products.wolframalpha.com/api/pricing.html, where the cheapest tier was 1000 requests for $60. Dunno why it took them so long given the angry backlash to their original API, http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/10/15/the-wolframalpha-api-has-arriv…

Haha, nice. W|A just posted a video on YouTube [1] that explained that they weren't actually exceeding their maximum load yet but that there's a bug on some of their machines that will send back that response. [1] - http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/16/wolframalpha-status-update/

Also, they have only provisioned for like 2000 requests a second [1], which seems pitiful for launch day when every one and their mother will hit the site. [1] http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/the-computers-powering-computa…

Google and WolframAlpha are not direct business competitors today (as many have pointed out.) But there is overlap in direction: Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/ Our overarching goal, the “higher purpose” of this project, is to make all computable, factual knowledge available to everyone. http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/04/28/welcome-to-the-wolfram-alpha-b…

The interesting part of their article is a trivial rehash of this one: http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/the-computers-powering-computa…

In the meantime, they just released a screencast demo done by Stephen Wolfram. It seems to be getting lost in the other news of the day but its pretty cool. http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/13/stephen-wolframs-introduction-…

The actual blog post at http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/going-live-and-webcasting-it/ says, "We’ll be making our first attempt to go live with Wolfram|Alpha this Friday evening, May 15. We’ll start webcasting our preparations at 7pm CDT (UTC -5)." I don't know how I feel about a Friday night launch. On the one hand the weekend allows for fixing problems, but on the other hand they are doing a webcast and have been building publicity for more than a month.

Falling with Helium - https://what-if.xkcd.com/62/ > While researching this article,[5] I managed to lock up my copy of Mathematica several times on balloon-related differential equations, and subsequently got my IP address banned from Wolfram|Alpha for making too many requests. The ban-appeal form asked me to explain what task I was performing that necessitated so many queries, so this is what I put: ... --- https://www.facebook.com/OfficialWolframAlpha/posts/did-you-know-that-… Did you know that we banned xkcd's Randall Munroe's IP address? Whoops! We address that mishap AND his query here: --- A Response to “Falling with Helium” - https://blog.wolframalpha.com/2013/09/19/a-response-to-falling-with-he… > Recently the author of xkcd, Randall Munroe, was asked the question of how long it would be necessary for someone to fall in order to jump out of an airplane, fill a large balloon with helium while falling, and land safely. Randall unfortunately ran into some difficulties with completing his calculation, including getting his IP address banned by Wolfram|Alpha. (No worries: we received his request and have already fixed that.)