MetaFilter posts tagged with wolfram and mathematica

Computable data* (conceivably knowable) about people

kliuless — Fri, 01 May 2009 06:42:19 -0800

Stephen Wolfram discusses Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine - at the same time Google Adds Search to Public Data, viz: "Nobody really paid attention to the two hour snorecast" -- like a cross between designing for big data and a glossary of game theory terms -- on Wolfram|Alpha (previously), yet the veil is being lifted nonetheless: "[on] a platonic search engine, unearthing eternal truths that may never have been written down before," cf. hunch & cyc (and in other startup news...) [via] *boiling it down to that which can be computed (about the world)

Wolfram|Alpha - the future of web search technology?

Foci for Analysis — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:17:12 -0800

Could Wolfram Research's (creator of Mathematica) Wolfram|Alpha be the future of web search technology?

But what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated? A lot of it is now on the web—in billions of pages of text. And with search engines, we can very efficiently search for specific terms and phrases in that text. But we can’t compute from that. And in effect, we can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can’t figure anything new out. [...] It’s going to be a website: www.wolframalpha.com. With one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.

What does it actually mean? TechCrunch breakes it down:

It doesn’t simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn’t just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn’t simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example. Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions — like questions that have factual answers such as “What country is Timbuktu in?” or “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?” or “What is the average rainfall in Seattle?”

True Knowledge, launched in 2007, uses similar technology. Powerset, yet another competitor, was aquired by Microsoft in 2008 but has yet to live up to its promise.

Integrals!

Upton O'Good — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 11:35:43 -0800

The Integrator is Mathematica's integration capabilities, available over the web. Other online resources from Wolfram include Tones, an automatic music generator, and the venerable Mathworld, an extensive collection of math terms and theorems. (which, yes, has been mentioned previously.)

none — Sun, 27 Jan 2002 05:31:54 -0800

The End of equations? Paul Dirac and Albert Einstein thought equations were things of beauty, Stephen Wolfram, by contrast thinks they are antiquated.