Among the many new things that greeted us recently, Wolfram|Alpha is perhaps one of the most controversial. This was due to the fact that it was embarking on an unfamiliar territory on the web. Ok, I admit when I first heard about Wolfram|Alpha, I tried to understand what it is and what it really does. Unfortunately, until now, my understanding of Wolfram Alpha is as vague as it was when it was released.
The good news is, there seems to be a lot of things going on for the past three months. In a long post by Wolfram Alpha Founder Stephen Wolfram, he narrates that:
It’s been a great first summer for Wolfram|Alpha. It was a mad dash to launch Wolfram|Alpha when we did. But we’ve actually built up over the summer to even greater development intensity, though now with a progressively larger team and increasingly streamlined development systems.
So, here are some of the developments on Wolfram|Alpha the past three months:
- reduced “fall-through rate” of queries not understood by Wolfram|Alpha by 10% – this means that Wolfram Alpha was able to deliver 90% of the results for all queries it received?
- one code update per week
- more talented programmers worldwide have joined the Wolfram Alpha Team
- over 2 million lines of Mathematica code were added, leading to 52% growth overall
- 50,000 manual groups of changes were made on their data repositories
- 10% to 15% growth in knowledge domains
- The Wolfram|Alpha Team received 54,233 bug reports, 31,006 are now fixed and ready for implementation
All these plus “zillions of little changes and fixes” were keeping the Wolfram|Alpha team busy the past three months. And Stephen Wolfram hopes that all these bugs and fixes will lead to the largest coherent repository of human knowledge ever known to man.
And in that post, Mr. Wolfram admits that about half of all attempts by visitors to use his offering, it fails. Interestingly enough he doesn’t mention that many of the sources they use for their data are crap sources with bogus information, or that the results provide no capacity for further details. I think its funny that they’re pouring millions of lines of code and thousands of new computations into the system because it’s still going to be a craptastic system except for a very narrow niche. And for the majority of people who go there looking for information, it’s still going to produce craptastic results.
It is great – especially when you have to do lots of calculations for IT it delivers great results: wide range of explanations / examples, no search engine advertisments, graphical functions, etc.
They focus on a reduced target group but do yuite well so far.
What is interesting is enough his doesn mentions most sources that they use as their data are the dice source with counterfeit information, or relevant detailed situations, the result was not offered ability. I ponder over that interesting theye of it (calculate and pour millions of codes walking and thousands of times into the system newly) ,Besides to still go a very narrow appropriate position being a craptastic system because of it.