Lord Lucan

His Lordship is in Marton

It can only know things that are known

Damn! And here I was hoping that it would prove the Riemann hypothesis, tell us what happens after death and identify the current location of Lord Lucan. But anyway, no-one tell Donald Rumsfeld.

Will be fascinating to see what future iterations of WA might capable of in about a decade...

Dare I say it, be careful what you wish for...

Yrs
The Monkey's Paw

Treating Alpha as just an answer box (from Associated Press. FACEPALM.) misses the point entirely. It’s not a knowledge base for humans.

That may be so, but they're certainly dying for humans to access it. I've been on the mailing list for a while and the very strong implication of…

Interesting website... except that it thinks Kiwi only refers to fruit.

It does a lot better with Apteryx

The online media and discussions about Wolfram Alpha remind me a lot of my first experience with an internet search engine c. 1996. A guy whose name I don't recall raved about…

a crack team of hot-shit robot librarians...the library is full of porn

Hey, that sounds like my sort of library!

On the bright side, Alpha works as pretty awesome statistics calculator.

And the provision of data as data, as well as the ability to chart it and calculate with it,…

global warming is caused by the sun interacting with a few other things, a major one being the composition of the earth's atmosphere.

Even Bigger SIGH...
The major one being the GLOBE.
Now, if you were refering to atmospheric warming i would agree but considering that the mass of the…

What about us learning to understand the machine? Getting better feedback from the machine?

Machines are basically cheap and getting cheaper; people are expensive.

(Quite aside from all the moral Taylorism issues and suchlike.)

Global warming is caused by the sun. End of story.

Nah, that's just the beginning of the story, global warming is caused by the sun interacting with a few other things, a major one being the composition of the earth's atmosphere. More greenhouse gases equals more warming for a given…

In theory, you should be able to ask a computer about global warming, and it will find that it is caused by greenhouse gases,

Sigh...
If it did I would suggest that you re-boot and if it still gives you that answer you should re-format your hard drive and install…

What about us learning to understand the machine? Getting better feedback from the machine?

This is one of WA's…

It’s a knowledge base for machines. And it’s a really important building block to allow machines to understand things about the real world. This would, in turn and in time, allow us to understanding more things about the world.

Viral marketing. Sounds like skynet. It'll become self-aware just in time…

it didn't say where the sun set at 7:07pm.

Yeh, it did. It picked up I was born in the supercity.

The sun set at 7.07 p.m on the day I was born don't you know.

Umm. Doesn't that actually depend on where you were born ? Since W|A doesn't know where you were born it cannot have provided the right answer. It's answer was kinda incomplete – it didn't say…

I'll come back when it's ready a few more books...

(BTW – at least it knows the meaning of life...)