{"id":1274,"date":"2009-05-16T14:02:39","date_gmt":"2009-05-16T13:02:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=1274"},"modified":"2009-05-21T11:05:23","modified_gmt":"2009-05-21T10:05:23","slug":"first-impressions-of-wolfram-alpha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=1274","title":{"rendered":"First impressions of Wolfram Alpha."},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m impressed! That sums up my initial feelings when I first started playing with Wolfram Alpha. As I played with it some more though it became apparent that this was wonderful project still needs a little work.<\/p>\n

I knew that my friend Maria<\/a> would get a crack at using Wolfram Alpha before I did so I checked her twitter feed to see what she thought about it. Astonishingly she uncovered a basic maths error – Wolfram Alpha tells us (at the time of writing) that the period of the tangent function is 2*pi when it is, in fact, pi. Digging a little further, I discovered that although it gives this incorrect result for the input tan(x)<\/a>,it gets it right for the input tan period<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Periodicty<\/p>\n

A minor bug (that I have no doubt will be fixed soon) to be sure but it does show that you can’t always trust the output of any computational system as they’ll always have bugs.\u00a0 Check, check and check again.<\/p>\n

It’s fun to see that even though Wolfram Alpha is a major project for WR, it doesn’t always take itself too seriously.\u00a0 For example, it was inevitable that legions of geeks around the world asked the question ‘What is the meaning of life?<\/a>”.\u00a0 WA gamely returns what we all expect.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

I’d love to know how many times that was searched for.<\/p>\n

References to popular geek culture continue.\u00a0 For example, you get the following error message when Wolfram Alpha gets overloaded.<\/p>\n

\"HAL<\/p>\n

I was astonished by the number of different data-sets you can search.\u00a0 For example, it contains US birth data so I can learn that use of the name Michael<\/a> for new babies is in decline and yet it is currently the 2nd most popular baby’s name in the US today.<\/p>\n

\"Babies<\/p>\n

Looking at the chart that WA provides me I see that Michael started to become a popular name in the mid-1930s and I suddenly wonder what happened around 1935 to make it so popular. Can any US Historians help me out?<\/p>\n

Right, so I know that Michael is the 2nd most common name in the US according to WA but what is the<\/strong> most popular name?\u00a0 How can I get it to give me that?\u00a0 The following searches (and a load of others) didn’t help me (at the time of writing).<\/p>\n