Because of all the media hubbub, I went to check out the search engine capabilities of wolframalpha.com.
Not having any profound question on my mind at the time, I typed in “multisets,” and it came back with Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.
So I said to myself, “I thought you were supposed to have all the answers?”
So I typed in “multiset,” although I hadn’t noticed that it had asked me on my last question, “Did you mean: multiset?”
This time, it came back with some operator notation that I suppose is associated with multisets. Again, I wasn’t impressed with the intelligence of this supposedly intelligent search engine.
Because I thought it might want to be comparing things, I entered in “multisets compared to sets.” Again, it wasn’t sure what I wanted.
I sat there a while, racking my brain trying to figure out what this thing was supposed to do. Finally, not wanting to read any documentation to figure out how I was supposed to use it, I clicked on one of the example links in the sidebar: x^2 sin(x).
After I saw it spit out a bunch of stuff that looked like it had come from Maple, the notion started to form in my mind, “Could this possibly be a free, web front end to Mathematica?”
So I clicked on examples at the top, and then clicked on calculus on the examples page, and then clicked on the first example: integrate x^2 sin^3 x dx.
In the right sidebar, I saw a link to something that looked like Mathematica documentation for the cosine function in Mathematica: Cos[z].
I clicked it, and that’s when some major revelation/hope started to sink in, and I said to myself, “Forget about trying to make this thing intelligently answer questions posed to it in everyday English, I wonder if it’ll let me use the complete Mathematica library of functions?”
So I noticed the link for Cos[z] had taken me to
- http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Cos.html
Being the extremely net savvy individual I am, I wanted to poke around and pick a Mathematica function haphazardly, so I shortened the link to
This led me to Mathematics and Algorithms, then to Number Theory, and then I picked PrimeQ out of the pack, and I tried it out: PrimeQ[12345678889]. And it worked.
That’s when I knew I had found a use for wolframalpha.com.
I abandoned Mathematica years ago because I was constantly formatting my hard drive, and every time I reinstalled Mathematica, I’d have to call Mathematica and beg for some kind of activation junk. So I bought a full blown version of Maple 7 off of eBay shortly after Maple 8 came out, for a clearance price of $35.
But I use Maple so infrequently I can never remember much about it, and there’s the hassle of firing it up to do some little plot or calculation, and then fire up the help page, and search for the syntax for some function I need.
However, my web browser is always open, and as you well know, access to information is the WWWs specialty. Why fire up that dictionary program of mine, and make my computer work harder, and take up more RAM, when it’s so easy to go to dictionary.com?
So where I wouldn’t touch Mathematica with a 10 foot dollar pole at this point, I’m more than happy to use their library of functions for that occasional specialty math function I want to use. Especially when it’s free and the documentation is all conveniently accessible from the web. I think I might even make Wolfram Web Resources my home page on my browser.
Wolfram has been doing all this work for years now, which has cost them millions of dollars, and through wolframalpha.com, they’re brought it to my attention that they’ve consolidated a whole lot of information and services that’s math related, and free. That’s sweet, as they say.
You gotta like those Wolfram guys for doing all this for us, or at least appreciate the competitive, capitalistic, market forces for giving them incentive to give us stuff for free. As far as Obama and all the socialist kips who voted for him, they’re no good, but Wolfram The Company and capitalism, those are okay things.
Now, if I need to get fancy, and string a bunch of their functions together, assign things to variables, and do that kind of stuff they call programming, something I hate to do these days, then I guess I’ll have to go back to Maple, unless, over time, I learn a bunch of Mathematica syntax and decide it’s easier to buy Mathematica. In that case, having fallen prey to the sales trick of wanting to buy something as a result of having gotten something for free, they’ll make some money off of me, but I hope not.
Somebody’s gonna fall for it though. The question is whether enough people will fall for it for Wolfram to stay in business. I really don’t care. It’s not my problem.
Filed under: Math
