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Re: Mathematica 8 "natural language" capabilities

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg113958] Re: Mathematica 8 "natural language" capabilities
  • From: Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net>
  • Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2010 05:09:52 -0500 (EST)

On 11/18/10 at 7:08 AM, jalex at lse.ac.uk (J. McKenzie Alexander)
wrote:

>Has anyone been able to get the "natural language" capabilities of
>Mathematica 8 to work as described? If I type Ctrl+= followed by

>=09plot sin x and cos x

>as listed in the examples, I get an error message saying that no
>Mathematica translations exist. Yet if I evaluate

>=09WolframAlpha["plot sin x and cos x"]

>I get the output I would expect.

My guess is this has to do with the ambiguity present. Should
plot sin x and cos x be translated to

Plot[Sin[x]+Cos[x],{x,...}]

or

Plot[{Sin[x],Cos[x]},{x,....}]

Quite frankly, to me the surprising thing isn't things don't
work as expected sometimes but that they do work as you want as
often as they do. I don't see the "natural language" capability
as being all that useful given the ambiguity inherent in natural language.



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