http://www.nadine.be/blog nadine is an arts laboratory aimed at developing research focusing on transdisciplinary experiments in the fields of new media and live arts. Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:39:23 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 http://www.nadine.be/blog/2009/05/nadine-loves-wolfram-alpha/ http://www.nadine.be/blog/2009/05/nadine-loves-wolfram-alpha/#comments Tue, 19 May 2009 14:05:02 +0000 tine http://www.nadine.be/blog/?p=3

Waw, look at this, WolframAlpha got launched.

Not a search engine, no sir, it’s a “computational knowledge engine”.  It generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.  (I stole this from the FAQ on http://www.wolframalpha.com/)

We’ll have to wait and see what the future brings for this tool, at the moment it doesn’t know as many keywords yet.  But as up to a first level it’s quite fun already.

Some examples,

If you fill in the name of one city (Brussels f.ex) it gives you concrete data (such as humidity, city population, …) about this one city.  If you fill in a second city (Brussels Antwerp) it actually makes comparisons, based on actual and concrete data.  Impossible to imagine with a normal search engine.  I guess if we’re patient enough to let this engine grow bigger and more intelligent that it will be a indispensable item in our online lives.  At the moment, maybe stick to using it for entertaining some friends.

Try these:

Where is Waldo?

Where are my keys?

Why did the chicken cross the road?

or simply typ:

Hello.

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