Instead break up the word problems into steps, translate the problems in mathematical equations with well-named variables and then send the equations to be solved to Wolfram Alpha. When solving math word problems do not send the whole word problem at once to Wolfram Alpha. "description_for_model": "Dynamic computation and curated data from Wolfram Alpha. "description_for_human": "Dynamic computation and curated data from Wolfram Alpha.", I wonder if the wise Dr Stephen Wolfram is on Twitter."openai": "3c769588676d4e5e876ebf70aa110d03" What's lacking in Wolfram Alpha are similarly transparent human beings. Instead of a computational engine, it contains a human engine that spits back useful knowledge in real-time from trustworthy people with whom I choose to communicate. Compared with Wolfram Alpha, Twitter is built on radically unsophisticated technology. The best answer was from noted cartoonist and the author of the hilarious new book Ignore Everybody, Hugh McLeod who tweeted: "Short Answer: Nobody knows." It had little value to non-scientists (ie: you and I). Is it for real?"Īnd the replies I got confirmed all my suspicions about the general uselessness of the product. As I tweeted my followers: "Don't understand Wolfram Alpha. Having experienced the wisdom of Stephen Wolfram's computational engine, I turned to the wisdom of my hand-picked crowd. So I went on to Twitter for a second opinion on Wolfram Alpha. My own scientific ignorance was stopping me realise the power of the latest new new thing.īut belittling myself doesn't come naturally. Given the massive hype around its launch, I assumed at first that it was me and not Wolfram Alpha at fault. Everything I entered into the computational engine n my date of birth, my political ideology, my religion and my football team n resulted in either useless or confusing information or both. My problem with Wolfram Alpha is that while it all sounded very exciting in theory, it didn't seem to work in practice. Wolfram Alpha is a taxonomist's wet dream, a computational engine that, in principle, enables us to splice and dice reliable knowledge to our heart's content. It's what Harvard University law professor Jonathan Zittrain calls a "computable almanac", designed to juxtapose data in myriad ways. In contrast with the internet trawling Google, Wolfram Alpha has aggregated and curated huge amounts of data from offline scientific sources. The just launched and hugely hyped Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of the American-based, Eton and Oxford-educated Dr Stephen Wolfram, a boy-genius physicist who got his PhD by the time he was 20 and who is the founder of the computational engine Mathematica.ĭescribed in The Independent on Sunday as "the biggest internet revolution for a generation", Wolfram Alpha claims to be a hugely powerful and sophisticated online computation data engine that retrieves information via the web. The first is a new internet service called Wolfram Alpha the second is the real-time social media network Twitter. The second is wisdom distributed in real-time by a global network of super-ordinary human beings. The first is scientific wisdom distributed out over the global network by a supposedly super sophisticated computer. What is the future of wisdom on the internet? Let me offer two quite different versions. Wolfram Alpha is a genius piece of software, but won't make sense out of everything.
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