Niklas' blog

So what’s that and why should you care?

Is it a search engine? Nope. So what is it? Tell me! I’ll tell.

Wolfram|Alpha is a computational knowledge-engine. It’s not dumb like Google search which merely spits out links, but gives you really interesting information in the form of data and visualisations. This is highly advanced computing; Wolfram|Alpha turns a regular user into a freaking power-beast by pushing a few buttons, then letting a plethora of clustered computers and bespoke code quickly turn vast arrays of data into something that’s actually usable. Woo.

The interface is Google-ish: a simple, one-line text-field lets you type what you want to do. In order to get the gist of this entire thing-a-ma-jig, here we go for a first, simple example. Let’s say you’ve been called by a guy saying you’ll win a car if you can quickly deliver the first 100 digits of pi (π):

Well, I hear your head rushing: Google can do that. Yeah, if you search for the same text, sift through a couple of links, click, analyse if you’ve got the correct results, and then you’re home. Hm. That does seem unnecessary compared with Wolfram|Alpha. Anyway, the above was a very simple example where data is displayed, but how about visualising stuff? Somebody who writes “weather springfield” to check the weather in Springfield may see the following:

Two interesting things here:

1. May? I wrote “may see the following”. Stupid? Ha! Here’s the explanation for that: there are a bunch of cities named “Springfield” across the globe. How does Wolfram|Alpha pick just that one? A tad of intelligence. Wolfram|Alpha notes – through geo targeting – where you are and calculates which Springfield is the closest to you. In this case, the example is by somebody who lives in Massachusetts, the USA. Clever. If the city’s not the right one, you get to pick another city from the drop-down list at the top.

2. You see a graph displaying the weather for the past ten days. You can easily switch from the pound system to metric, and drop-down to see another time-frame, and even see a prognosis for the forthcoming weather.

Prognosis. Interesting. Cool. Does this mean that Wolfram|Alpha has a lot of computing power to back it up? You bet. From the horse’s mouth on what the service will dish out on launch-day:

The ability to handle 175 million queries (yielding maybe a billion) per day—over 5 billion queries (encompassing around 30 billion calculations) per month

Wow. Should you care? Not really. It’ll probably just all work.¹

Here’s another interesting example that shows the computing power being utilised.

LDL is often used in cholesterol blood tests. Serum potassium is a test that measures the amount of potassium found in blood. Imagine you’d like to compare these two types of tests, and also throw in a factor saying you only want to see results as pertains to a 40-year-old male smoker.

I can’t even imagine how much time it would take me to research that using bits and pieces, even if I’d only use the web. And then I’d have to sift through it all to find out which sources were at all – if any – credible and hence usable. Mother of Bog. Instead, I get this courtesy of Wolfram|Alpha:

Graphs are created, info that Wolfram|Alpha displays as relevant is here as well as the sources for the data. The idea with Wolfram|Alpha isn’t only to display a simple answer for your query, but also detail a number of datasets. An example of this is typing the height and weight of a person, ending up with conversion options, BMI, metabolic rates, et.c.

This is far from the end of it. What colour do you get if you match red and yellow? What’s the median wage of a high-school teacher? Or what happens if you type the URL of a site?

I love this. So, what’s there to criticise? It’s hard to find anything bad about a service that’s free and for the good of humanity², but if I have to pre-judge anything, it would be very interesting to see from where Wolfram|Alpha pulls its data, especially when it finds conflicting data about the same answer. Also, I’d love to see the politics behind it. Who gets to say what and how’s the content being manipulated? They are very open about the entire process of putting Wolfram|Alpha together, but I’d love to see the innards – which, understandably, aren’t displayed to the general public.

Google Squared³ will most probably be Google’s response to this service, all displayed in spreadsheet form. More about that right here.

Almost all of the examples above are culled from this excellent introductory film. I abridged a bit from that film to focus on the financial aspects and placed it here; please note that the quality of my snippet is poor in comparison with the one mentioned first in this paragraph.

A video from the makers on the near-finished product:

1. Hahahahahaha! Assumption being the mother of most fuck-ups, of course.[back]
2. Providing terrorists won’t use it. Oh noes![back]
3. Link not in use at the time of posting, but will be.[back]