What's going on? Did Wolfram Alpha stop being useful, or did people just forget about it?
Their natural language queries for things that I know they know about are amazing. Here are some that I have used recently. You really need to see these results to appreciate them.
I wanted to know how tall my daughter might be.
8 year old female 55 lbs
I wanted to know the nutrition content of an egg sandwich.
1 egg, two slices whole wheat bread, one slice of cheddar, two pieces of bacon
I was curious about the relative usage of two names over time.
Michael, Henry
How much that cloud instance really costs
$0.03/hr * 1 month
10 TB per month in Mbpshttps://www.gnu.org/software/units/units.html
the input language is less flexible than wolframalpha/google, but i quickly got used to it. it's nice to have something local and reliable. you can also define custom units.
i prefer using it in terse mode:
$ units -t 0.03$/hr*1month
21.914532 US$
$ units -t 10TB/month Mbps
30.421214 (day length of jupiter) * 80I definitely could've worked that out by hand, but it would've taken a minute or a few, mostly on unit conversions. With WA, I can just think in variable relationships and not worry about units at all.
Don't get me wrong, it often returns complete garbage, see all the memes of Siri passing non-math questions to it. It's annoying to figure out or explain to someone because the syntax is very loose and you just kind of need to get a feel for it, but once you do, it's really powerful.
1: https://frinklang.org/ 2: https://frinklang.org/#SampleCalculations
Its been on HN before.
> 1 egg, two slices whole wheat bread, one slice of cheddar, two.. leaves of lettuce ..
and he said it's wrong and useless (!) - giving me examples and numbers as:
protein assimilability from bread is 40% etc.
Is there a way to get correct answers from Wolfram regarding this ?
(assimilability of doesn't work)
Edit: Excuse me, what's wrong with you downvoters - it's a legit question. Or is there something wrong with assimilability? Are you happy being off with your answers by 60% - or jealous that a human can have better answers?
This is something that actually annoys me immensely when people say "you eat too much!" to fat people. Two people can have the exact same diet and the exact same exercise regime, and if one assimilates particular foods more effectively they'll be getting more calories, and put on weight. Food intake is far more complex than many people believe.
This is wrong; the digestibility of gluten is 80-90%. Your friend was probably thinking of the PDCAAS, which is more like 45 for gluten. But this is nutritional quality vs an egg white equivalent as defined by the bioavailability and concentration of essential amino acids (egg = 100 by definition; the score is based on the lowest fraction of any EAA, so gelatin — no tryptophan — has PDCAAS 0), not the fraction absorbed or utilized. For an idea of what utilization looks like see e.g.:
https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/nutrients/nutrients-10-001...
> The limiting amino acid for wheat is lysine.
From what I gather, you still can process all of the protein from wheat if you get lysine from somewhere else:
> A vegetarian or low animal protein diet can be adequate for protein, including lysine, if it includes both cereal grains and legumes.
This also means that any statements about protein utilization from compound meals are more-or-less bogus if done without calculating the different amino acids.
It also might help to avoid insinuating things about strangers online in order to promote discussion and not stifle it.
I don't know what's wrong with the downvoters.
Seems more like the quality of the queries rather than the results. Many of the complaints I see about google and friends is related to them dumbing down search for the global common denominator.
Any advice on rephrasing it to work would be welcomed. Downside to allegedly natural language query systems - there's no concise explanation of syntax it recognises.
2. Every time I use it, a box saying
NEW: Use textbook math notation to enter your math. TRY IT
3. I'm a long-term Mathematica user, but typing literal Mathematica syntax usually never works, except for simple expressions.
4. Results are PNGs, and copy-pasting a numerical result takes a few unnecessary clicks. "Plain Text" > Copy.
Wolfram Alpha is implemented in Mathematica, which --- to understate the situation --- was never intended as a high performance backend server language. I suspect that's the reason for the bad performance.
"As a result, the five million lines of Mathematica code that make up Wolfram|Alpha are equivalent to many tens of millions of lines of code in a lower-level language like C, Java, or Python." [1]
Sure, there's something to be said for implementing logic in high-level code, but without a plan for lowering that high-level logic to machine code in a way that performs well, you're setting yourself up for long-term pain.
[1] https://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/01/the-secret-behind-t...
Whatever the reason for the performance issue (I don't know enough about WA to speculate what/why/how), I feel like noting the existence of the wolfram compiler[0] and the various language interfaces[1]. Anyone interested in using Mathematica/WL might get a kick out of exploring those more, at the very least.
[0] https://reference.wolfram.com/language/Compile/tutorial/Over...
[1] https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/CLanguageInterf... (a lot of the paclets are bindings for C libraries too)
There is also no reason to think that their request-response boilerplate is written in Mathematica, Mathematica is fully integrated with a lot of languages and runtimes.
Is there a way to make it plot multivariate functions? I tried but whenever I enter two variables it says "Cannot plot multivariate function." I've seen many Python packages plotting multivariate functions so I'm convinced it should be possible.
from sympy.plotting import plot3d
x,y=symbols('x y')
plot3d(x*y, (x, -10,10), (y, -10,10))I will say, though, that Wolfram|Alpha could be "optimised" in the sense that it could do less fancy JS and be a simple box with a submit button, like SymPy Gamma.
When Apple first started using it, they were responsible for 25% of all WA traffic. With Alexa, I assume that the majority of WA's queries are coming from smart assistants at this point. (https://9to5mac.com/2012/02/07/four-months-in-siri-represent..., https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/20/18150654/alexa-wolfram-a...)
The answers in the back of the book didn't tell me step-by-step how I solved the problem. It just gave me the answer and there are many times I couldn't figure out which step I made the error. Usually it was some dumb mistake, but by identifying the dumb mistake, I could remember to double check that similar step in future problems.
I had a hard time using it for Classical Physics to check my work.
(source: conjecture, but I did work at WR for 3 years and on the initial Wolfram|Alpha release)
WA offers answers with drawings. Google cannot do that.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+3mm+circles+p...
I love WA and use it all the time, but it's so hard to know when a query will work and when it won't. When it fails it fails hilariously.
Here's some of my favorite queries:
- https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2.2+bagels%2Fday+*+ave...
- https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+dilation+given+v+...
- https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=400+miles+%2F+20mpg+*+...
- https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=US+unemployment+rate+v...
- https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=warp+speed+6+in+deep+s...
Instead I use the SymPy Live shell https://live.sympy.org/ which does most of what I need in terms of math calculations. I'm a big fan of the sharable links (the thumbtack button below the prompt) that you can post in comments to show an entire calculation encoded in the URL querystring, e.g., https://live.sympy.org/?evaluate=factor(x**2%2B5*x%2B6)%0A%2... (factoring a polynomial), or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23158095 (linear algebra helper function).
Instead, I use Colab with Sympy + latex output and matplotlib (and most other things you could want to import, pre-installed). It's running new versions of things, and backed by more power, with an option to pay for even more. The latex rendering took a bit of poking around stackoverflow, but works just fine.
Feel free to copy:
https://colab.research.google.com/gist/dmlerner/23543255fdde...
Edit: Maybe it's just good enough that people treat it as a tool and see no need to market it. It consistently has worked fine-ish for years and is useful at what it does.
I guess what I should be doing is looking at the Alexa ranking of Wolfram Alpha.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Real:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Real%28+%281%2F%281%2F...
Imaginary:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Imaginary%28+%281%2F%2...
Edit: Sorry, I don't know how to make the search query text show up since it has special characters, probably best to just use the links to see the query.
"4 drinks in 3 hours at 64 kg"
"2 beers (composition of 8% alcohol, 44cl) in 1 hour at 80kg"
I tried with or without parenthesis and with varying query. Never worked.
Any ideas?
(I'm interesting on knowing the level of blood alcohol percentage and the duration it takes to go under the limit, depending on the percentage of alcohol and quantity)
Every now and then I go to their site to have a look -- and then realize that I'm not going to go subscribe to some piece of software I'm unsure I will be using enough to justify the cost.
I think their online book is a very nice intro: https://www.wolfram.com/language/elementary-introduction/2nd...
I mean, good for them that they're doing well. They probably don't need the money. But their technology is highly unlikely to ever be part of any software I write. And it isn't because it is a bad fit. I do lots of stuff that would benefit greatly from having Mathematica plugged into it.
Thanks for the tip on the book. I might actually buy the paper edition and read that.
Last time I tried to use retrieval features for nuclear data there was absolutely no citation info or documentation whatsoever, just numbers from who knows where. WA had so much potential but peaked about 3 years after it came out as far as i can tell. That being said it's still vastly superior to doing calculations with google.
Does your institution have mathematica? In mathematica you can query WA directly, and it gives you as much (or possibly more, from how it seems to behave for me) computing time as people with WA pro subscriptions. I use it all the time for stuff like graphing complicated implicit 3d surfaces or doing multiple integrals, stuff where I know the relevant mathematica command but I would rather not type it out fully
- Converting units while cooking. I prefer to cook by weight, and for most ingredients, you can do something like "2 cups of flour in g"
- Stuff I'd have used a scientific calculator in an earlier era: simple systems of equations, plots, etc.
- Comparing stats on countries, e.g. GDP growth in various countries
I guess it's safe to say I would not have passed some algebra and electrical engineering exams without it.
One tip I have (not sure if it still works though): Buy the Android or iOS app for a few bucks to get access to the step by step solutions if you can't afford the pro subscription.
Let's not go wild here ;)
It's ~20% more expensive in Euro than in Dollar. (And Poland, which I checked for curiosity as it's in the EU but does not use Euro, has a price in Pound with is even higher; Poland is not a rich country).
Also I don't think charging for example people in countries in Africa as much as for example US people makes any sense.
The service is really great for some questions but the commercial offer never added up for me.
If the software would be OpenSource and run on prem I would consider buying some additional online services for it (even at the current random price point and without having a real use case; it's not more expensive than an average online game, so bearable). It would make also that "Wolfram Language" worth having a look at. But I don't bother even glimpsing at closed source programming languages. That's especially one of the things they do very poorly.
Keep in mind US prices don't include sales tax (VAT).
So ~20% more makes actually sense.
Thanks for pointing this out!
I’m a frequent Mathematica user and I find almost all of my use cases require several different attempts to get the desired result w/wolfram alpha. Meanwhile, most people who don’t get the right result the first time will probably just give up and not think to rephrase the query.
Although for the basics of differential geometry like the Weingarten equations and the Dupin indicatrix WA is lacking - as is Wikipedia except for the articles in the german Wikipedia. And I haven't found a way to get to the 'Weingarten equations' searching for 'Weingarten', you only find him by the full name 'Julius Weingarten'. :(
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weingartenabbildung https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=weingarten+equations https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indikatrix https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=dupin+indikatrix
:-)
Putting it another way, it's too hard to know what WA knows and doesn't know. I alluded to this in a post I wrote back when WA first came out: https://gcanyon.wordpress.com/2009/06/07/bing-wolfram-alpha-... "As Alpha grows and adds new problem domains it will become more and more useful, but it will continue to be necessary to understand what it can and can’t do, and how to get it to divulge what it knows."
And the more complex things WA could do oftentimes require a bunch of trial and error to figure out the correct syntax/phrasing to use to get correct results, to the point where it was just easier to either do the calculation manually or find a dedicated site for it.
So it has just lost utility for me.
A lot more people can script now, so open source packages of computer algebra systems (Sage, numpy, scipy etc.) Probably take a small bite.
And then you have closed source ones to consider like Matlab.
The second largest chunk probably being bitten out of it is its web and app competitors (desmos, symbolab, etc.) Alexa rankings show that these see a lot more traffic and engagement (2 - 3 times).
Finally, a small portion of its functionality is now covered by search engines. I imagine they'll continue to gobble things up. There are also a few good Web tools, I used one for a linear algebra course I found a lot better than the freeware version of WolframAlpha that came with my Raspberry Pi.
I can't find any reports on its revenue or net income. I would be super curious who uses it. Maybe it's growing... who knows? I also remember it being recommended a lot in the early 2010s.
I find it faster and more accurate to use a specific package in an interpreter than query Wolfram Alpha or use Mathematica. And for the simpler things a search engine will do!
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+astronomers+d...
None; astronomers prefer the dark.
Out of sight, out of mind. It's still there
Good thing is, they have a montly cost, but the mobile app you just buy once and it works forever. And it's not that expensive iirc.
> They put their "step-by-step" explanations behind a [login/pay]wall which made it significantly less useful.
You searched wrong. Excluding today, the most recent comment was 7 days ago, and there were quite a few more in the past month.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1636070400&dateRange=custom&...
I'm a Linux user and prefer an open-source solution. But I have no objection to paying a reasonable amount of money for a good commercial solution. Maybe Maple is worth looking at?
I haven't used Maple for a while so can't speak to it's current functionality but there's been several times I've wanted to do something in Sympy/Octave and haven't found it whereas I can almost always get Mathematica to do what I want with a quick search. I tend to rely heavily on it for some more complicated/specific symbolic operations (e.g. symbolically transforming probability distributions) and for that use case, I haven't found anything better.
I'll also say that if your use case if more numerical/programming oriented, the language used might be an important factor. I personally don't like Wolfram Language and use very few of its language features and prefer Python for anything that Mathematica isn't suited for out of the box.
Of course, its CAS capabilities are still useful. But I find that simplifications done on paper are often more straighforward, than making some expressions transform into the expected form in Maxima. Also, it's somewhat handy to have the ability to output the formulas in TeX format.
I vaguely remember Maple being more apt at expected simplifications.
Either way, I believe that Sage, Octave, Maxima etc. should be rather supplemental to textbook-based learning. In such way their results won't appear as pure magic, but as somewhat expected outcome of analysis.
My experience suggests avoiding Maple like the plague. Sympy (and Sage) can do everything I ever used it for much nicer and easier.
Probably an incredibly trivial use-case but still useful regularly for me...
$ TZ=Europe/Warsaw date --date=@1636221900
sáb 06 nov 2021 19:05:00 CET
$ TZ=Europe/Warsaw date --date=2021-11-06T19:05 +%s
1636221900
$ echo $(( ($(TZ=Europe/Riga date +%s --date=2021-11-05T17:00) - $(TZ=America/New_York date +%s --date=2021-12-05T09:00)) / 3600 ))
-719
$ TZ=Mars date --date=@1636221900
sáb 06 nov 2021 18:05:00 Mars
$ TZ=/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/
Amsterdam Berlin Chisinau Isle_of_Man Lisbon Mariehamn Paris San_Marino Stockholm Vaduz Zagreb
Andorra Bratislava Copenhagen Istanbul Ljubljana Minsk Podgorica Sarajevo Tallinn Vatican Zaporozhye
Astrakhan Brussels Dublin Jersey London Monaco Prague Saratov Tirane Vienna Zurich
Athens Bucharest Gibraltar Kaliningrad Luxembourg Moscow Riga Simferopol Tiraspol Vilnius
Belfast Budapest Guernsey Kiev Madrid Nicosia Rome Skopje Ulyanovsk Volgograd
Belgrade Busingen Helsinki Kirov Malta Oslo Samara Sofia Uzhgorod Warsaw
$ TZ=/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Riga date
dom 07 nov 2021 06:50:44 EET
Might be a good learning exercise in machine learning: translating natural-language queries from that domain to whatever standard utility.
Example: 4 atomic mass units * (1000 nm/sec)^2
Google Result: 6.64215616 × 10-39 joules
I use this all the time. I use wolfram alpha for solving equations or systems of equations but I use google for unit conversions because it's got better input parsing (frankly).
I should try the wolfram alpha math entry mode probably, I think that didn't exist when I started using it. If I could manually enter the equations with stricter formatting to ensure it's interpreted properly I'd use it more.
$ units
Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2021-01-17
3677 units, 109 prefixes, 114 nonlinear units
You have: 4 amu * (1000 nm/s)^2
You want: joules
* 6.6421563e-39
/ 1.5055352e+38
You have: ^D
If I had to do this in my head or with a desk calculator, I’d just do it in high-energy units (c = ℏ = 1, mass and energy in eV, length and time in eV^-1). So,
4 amu = 4 × 0.93 GeV (a proton weighs 939 MeV, an amu is slightly smaller due do binding energy, rounding to 1 GeV is good enough for most purposes) ≈ 4 GeV,
(1000 nm / s)^2 = (1e4 Å / s)^2 = (1e4 / 1.97 keV^-1 s^-1)^2 (an angstrom is a typical atomic size, a keV is a typical [large] atomic energy, a fermi aka femtometer is a typical nuclear size, a MeV is a typical [not so large] nuclear energy, remember any of 197 MeV fm = 1.97 keV Å = 1, though again 200 is almost always good enough) ≈ (1e4 / 2 keV^-1 s^-1)^2 = 25e6 keV^-2 s^-2,
4 GeV × 25e6 keV^-2 s^-2 = 4e6 keV × 100e6/4 × keV^-2 s^-2 = 1e14 keV^-1 s^-2.
1e14 keV^-1 s^-2 ≈ 1e14 keV^-1 s^-2 × (2 keV Å)^2 / (3e8 m/s)^2 = 4/9 × 1e14 × 1e-16 keV Å^2 m^-2 = 0.44 × 1e14 × 1e-16 keV × (1e-10)^2 ≈ 0.44e-22 keV ≈ 0.44e-19 eV.
0.44e-19 eV = 0.44e-19 eV × 1.6e-19 J / eV (turns out converting to a decimal fraction wasn’t a good idea after all, powers of two FTW) ≈ 4/9 × 16 × 1e-1 × 1e-19 × 1e-19 J = 64/9 × 1e-39 J ≈ 63/9 × 1e-39 J = 7e-39 J.
OK, I won’t pretend that this is easy or that I did it flawlessly the first time just now, but I do think this looks like a skill you could plausibly learn, unlike the textbook “SI all the things” calculation. The good news is that you’ve just seen essentially all the relevant constants you’re going to have to remember, except maybe Avogadro’s number if you’re going to have moles somewhere.
(One place where this doesn’t help is first-principles chemistry, things like electrolysis, because you need to subtract large binding energies to get a change that’s hundreds to thousands times smaller. Calculating things to a couple percent just isn’t good enough.)
It did OK figuring the fake "temperature" of LHC beams that fusion people like to quote because they sound more impressive than GeV.
Step one: Ask for your own life expectancy.
Step two: Ask for the life expectancy of someone years' younger.
Step three: What.
Step four: Oh.
I'm waiting for the final release, and then I'm waiting some more for it to be declared stable, and then I'm waiting some more for it to catch on and be declared popular.
Not really, but that's what the name suggests to me.
I just tried it here because of TFA and it's good.
distance to the moon
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+to+the+moon
W.A. shows the actual current distance to the moon (as of right now, 224,520 miles). Google shows this as 238,900 miles, presumably an average value, but it has no explanation at all of what the number is. W.A. also includes a graph showing the variance. And a lot of other info.
When I'm making exercises to explain to my students in the math class, I use W.A. to double check the answer.
I also use it for calculation for comments in HN. Sometimes I need to make a back of the envelope calculation, and W.A. can convert the units and other boring stuff.
For whatever reason, I like keeping track of 1000 day anniversaries
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1000+days+after+today
Shortly before any kind of 3rd anniversary or birthday I try to remember to check this.
https://interesting-anniversaries.com/
From my readme:
“Have you ever wanted to know when you turn 2 billion seconds old? How about 33,333,333 minutes old? When do you get to celebrate your 555,555th hour of life? As it turns out, all three of those milestones occur in the same 24-hour period!”
My luck is mixed:
* ~33% - It works
* ~33% occasions - I mess up syntax and give up
* ~33% - I mess up syntax, but believe it SHOULD be possible, and push much longer than I untended. Until finally settling on a partial solution, and wishing I knew more - but also recognising I should used a different tool e.g. excel
it just hasn’t been updated in quite some time. there are a lot of ways the back end could support new UI features etc., but something seems to be holding it back.
Don't think I've even visited the website in the past 6 years.
It's alive and quite healthy
Wolfram Alpha was a pet project of Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica. He had grand visions for it. And for the first few years, it seemed like he was doubling down on it.
But then he got bored and started tackling a bigger problem: his own solution to the "theory of everything" problem -- something that has eluded the world's best physicists for decades.
But he was confident that he could best them all. Because he created Mathematica.
The scientific community wasn't having it:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic...
He's a leading thinker obsessively interested in this idea that everything around us is the product of a simple, fundamental ruleset.
He's sitting on the bleeding edge of human knowledge where, honestly, everyone is at risk of being full of shit. Scientific consensus isn't really any kind of indicator of future breakthroughs.
To each their own - let Wolfram be Wolfram.
I think his "new kind of science" needs to be singled out from Wolfram alpha and Mathematica as especially crank-ish. It appears to be an attempt at a grand foundational philosophical statement, but it doesn't interact with pre-existing literature that covers similar territory, conveys ideas with pictures and informal statements without robust definitions, doesn't have an underlying bedrock of concepts or uniform vocabulary, and doesn't have the focus or clarity of purpose to rise to the level of being right or wrong. And it nevertheless maintains a grandiose tone of establishing an entirely new domain of science
It's not necessarily wrong, but it is unfortunately very vague and concerningly childish, even though I think it does have some meaningful things to say. It's a very fair example in favor of crankery.
Cranks can do good work, but when they get out of their depth and don't realize it, blaming everyone else, that's when they become cranks.
I like Wolfram, and I think there are some interesting and fundamental insights in among the relentless self promotion, but ANKOS is a painful read, even though I find cellular automata a fascinating model.
I'd highly recommend Sean's podcast in general for those interested in physics topics and prefer a more technical discussion that the usual physics podcasts.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/07/12/155-...
That's unkind, and that's definitely not what he says.