After a eager post last month reporting on the launch of the Wolfram Alpha online analytic engine, we have sadly little in the way of a user review to offer, despite some good intentions. The concept of surpassing search with analytics and transforming unstructured, natural language queries into computations is great, but in these early days the site accesses too little data to be useful to this user.
The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out "on the fly", according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.
Added Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Alpha's creator:
"We are just at the beginning. I think we've got a reasonable start on 90 per cent of the shelves in a typical reference library."
- "doctors in portland, or"
- "health care spending vs. GDP"
- "health care in CA"
- "doctors per capita"
- "hospitals spokane"
- "age demographics oregon" or "age oregon"
- "medicaid spending"
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