Wolfram Alpha - Idiot Savant?
I tried out the new search engine Wolfram Alpha today. It launched on Monday and would supposedly be able to answer questions that are more ‘knowledge based’ than Google would normally be able to answer.
I say ‘normally’ since I know someone with such an amount of unshakeable trust in getting answers back from Google that they type in full sentence queries, for example: “what is the difference between tone and pulse phones”.
This exactly the question that came up recently in a conversation in the office (the alpha males who normally would know these sort of questions without having to resort to Google just being out of reach at that point).
Before she could start typing the question into Google, I had the brilliant idea of trying it out on Wolfram Alpha. Strangely enough, it didn’t know what we were talking about….
“Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.” is the answer that came back.
Mhhmmm… let’s see what google makes of it: Yup, the answer to the question is there within the first three results.
I wouldn’t have thought that this is such a difficult question to answer for Wolfram Alpha, after all, it can tell you the height of Everest and the current temperature in Johannesburg, but yeah, it reminds me a bit of the Rain Man….
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