Re: Re: comments on Wolfram Alpha
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg100366] Re: [mg100335] Re: comments on Wolfram Alpha
- From: "David Park" <djmpark at comcast.net>
- Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 06:41:50 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <gvtmjt$gjb$1@smc.vnet.net> <6744902.1243858301056.JavaMail.root@n11>
True, but then it loses any synergy from the Internet. It is just a natural language connection between Mathematica and WRI curated sets of data. It's good as a supercalculator, at questions about scientific data, and recent stock prices, but poor at most other things until they fill in more data. In my view it is not a true Internet application. The web just provides a portal to a self-contained application. At least, that is the way I see it. Does W|A ever access the Internet for information between the time a user types a question and the time it provides a response? Perhaps it accesses data on the web, but only sites that WRI has curated and pre-linked to. This would only amount to other people storing the data for them. And "curated" probably means they have created a driver interface to get the data into Mathematica form and W|A. The data is the weak link and it will probably involve A LOT OF WORK to get a really good set of data "about the world" into usable form such that users would be surprised and delighted with the response. David Park djmpark at comcast.net http://home.comcast.net/~djmpark/ From: Sjoerd C. de Vries [mailto:sjoerd.c.devries at gmail.com] Alpha is NOT a search engine.