Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

onedognight · 4 years ago

I use it regularly. Sometimes it’s broken, and maybe nobody notices but me? :)

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

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=8%20year%20old%20female...

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

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%20egg%2C%20two%20slic...

I was curious about the relative usage of two names over time.

   Michael, Henry

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Michael%2C%20Henry

mike_d · 4 years ago

Also a frequent WA user. I use it for things I could calculate, but are much faster to just ask in plain text.

How much that cloud instance really costs

  $0.03/hr * 1 month

Bandwidth calculations for hosting providers

  10 TB per month in Mbps

5- · 4 years ago

you might want to try units(1).

https://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

Laremere · 4 years ago

Yeah, it's great for these types of things. It also has a bunch of values built in, so you can do things like:

  (day length of jupiter) * 80

franga2000 · 4 years ago

Same here, the way it seamlessly wrangles even the most ridiculous combinations of units is insanely useful. Just yesterday I used it to calculate power consumption for a house by timing one of those spinning wheel meter things. Something like "(10 rot / 46 s) / (375 rot / kW*h)" and it gave me straight answer in watts.

I 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.

maneesh · 4 years ago

I use Google for those pretty often.

Keyframe · 4 years ago

You also might want to try google search. They display calculations for these particular queries and quite a few more.

vinodkd · 4 years ago

or frink [1], which started off as a tool like the others mentiond here, but is now a full fledged units-based programming language. See some examples of them here [2]

1: https://frinklang.org/ 2: https://frinklang.org/#SampleCalculations

Its been on HN before.

skinkestek · 4 years ago

The sandwich example was brilliant! I never expected that to be possible (the example of packing smaller circles in a larger one in another comment is also brilliant but less useful for me today I think.)

thro1 · 4 years ago

Just asked a friend about this:

> 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?

onion2k · 4 years ago

Wolfram isn't reporting how much protein you'll get from eating something; it's reporting how much there is in the bread. Protein assimilation depends on a huge range of factors, and varies significantly between individuals (based on everything from gut microbiome to health factors to how much you chew your food to your saliva production to... Well, it's a long list). There's no way a website could report the amount of protein you will get from bread. Reporting how much is in the bread makes much more sense. It's a shame your friend didn't explain that.

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.

scythe · 4 years ago

>protein assimilability from bread is 40%

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...

aasasd · 4 years ago

> The net protein utilization is profoundly affected by the limiting amino acid content—the essential amino acid found in the smallest quantity in the foodstuff. It is therefore a good idea to mix foodstuffs that have different weaknesses in their essential amino acid distributions.

> 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.

LordOfWolves · 4 years ago

It might help to explain what your friend says is “wrong and useless” so others could provide feedback.

It also might help to avoid insinuating things about strangers online in order to promote discussion and not stifle it.

kragen · 4 years ago

You can improve the protein assimilability of bread by combining it with a high-lysine protein (and I'm not sure but I think eggs and cheddar might fit the bill) but you may not care if you're looking for low-glycemic-index low-fat calories rather than amino acids specifically.

I don't know what's wrong with the downvoters.

chihuahua · 4 years ago

It seems that Wolfram Alpha also has some difficulty figuring out whether I'm talking about raw oats or cooked oats, even when I use the word raw in my query. As a result, it can be off by a factor of 3. I agree that it's not useful if you have to carefully check the output every time.

ISL · 4 years ago

Yeah; I use it for the occasional repeating specialized query, but have never broadened my usage to anything more-general.

BelenusMordred · 4 years ago

> You really need to see these results to appreciate them.

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.

EdwardDiego · 4 years ago

I really struggled with the "natural" language queries for this: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=+new+south+wales+covid...

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.

sixothree · 4 years ago

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=stars+in+the+observabl...

Dead Comment

vortico · 4 years ago

1. It's slow, even for simple microsecond computations like log(2). Takes about 5-20 seconds to load a page on my 1Gb fiber connection. Opening Python/SymPy Gamma is much faster for most things. https://gamma.sympy.org/input/?i=log%282%29

2. Every time I use it, a box saying

    NEW: Use textbook math notation to enter your math. TRY IT

pops up over the result, and clicking the X doesn't hide it the next time I search. This adds ~3 seconds to the result time.

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.

quotemstr · 4 years ago

> Takes about 5-20 seconds to load a page on my 1Gb fiber connection

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...

vortico · 4 years ago

I doubt the bad performance is due to evaluating expressions itself. If I type N[Log[2]] into Mathematica, it evaluates in less than a millisecond. It's probably because Wolfram Alpha is using natural language process to try to process my query and then finally deciding that by N[Log[2]], I mean N[Log[2]]. And it's probably not because of that, but because their grid scheduler isn't optimized for sub-second latency.

nhammond · 4 years ago

> 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.

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)

Banana699 · 4 years ago

Mathematica is extremely performant for most of the built-ins, the overhead of interpretation is nearly negligible for all but the tiniest operations.

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.

hdjjhhvvhga · 4 years ago

> Opening Python/SymPy Gamma is much faster for most things.

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.

vortico · 4 years ago

I don't think so. You'd need to run it in a terminal with something like

    from sympy.plotting import plot3d
    x,y=symbols('x y')
    plot3d(x*y, (x, -10,10), (y, -10,10))

_fizz_buzz_ · 4 years ago

I usually use python for math stuff also, however I think the log(2) example is maybe the wrong example. I basically got an instant result for that (just recorded this): https://imgur.com/a/g5slHsR

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herpderperator · 4 years ago

Your Internet bandwidth is not relevant when talking about a compute-heavy backend like this. Wolfram|Alpha is not going to load any faster on a 1Gbps connection than it will on a 20Mbps connection, other than some static assets, but even that isn't going to be hugely noticeable if we're talking about 2ms RTT on fibre vs 8-20ms RTT on cable/DSL. If you're downloading a giant file off a nearby CDN, then sure, 1Gbps fibre is useful. I can max out my 1400Mbps cable connection downloading things this way (it's mind-blowing...), and my latency to my upstream gateway outside of my house is 8ms. But Wolfram|Alpha isn't going to load 40% faster for me than it will for you since it's I/O bound and your end-to-end latency is waiting for the backend to complete your request.

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.

canadaduane · 4 years ago

I think that's the point. "My internet speed is fast enough that it is not the cause of slowness, so any delay is all on Wolfram|Alpha."

vortico · 4 years ago

If I didn't include that note, someone would say "Is is slow because you're on 56kbps dial-up?"

nerevarthelame · 4 years ago

Siri and Alexa pass a lot of questions to Wolfram Alpha.

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...)

portpecos · 4 years ago

I used it for Calc 1 and 2. It helped me check my work for Limits, derivatives, integrals, Reimann Summs, Series, Sequences. I love the part that says "Show Step By Step" because I can figure out which step I made an error.

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.

mejutoco · 4 years ago

Same. It also has a problem generator to practice different kinds of problems (https://www.wolframalpha.com/problem-generator/?scrollTo=Cal...). Note the step-by-step solution is paid.

kragen · 4 years ago

Have you tried using Sympy? It's not as sophisticated as Mathematica but it's a lot more usable than Wolfram Vertical Line Alpha.

aj7 · 4 years ago

Having someone, or a program, show you where you went wrong is a good way to learn nothing. All the learning comes with struggling when you almost have the answer.

nprz · 4 years ago

Same, helped me quite bit back when I was taking Calc 1 and 2 for that same reason.

primitivesuave · 4 years ago

I think the strategy of Wolfram Research has shifted from trying to sell Wolfram Alpha as a standalone service, to selling the Wolfram Language with WA functions for retrieving standard datasets. A finance professional, for example, probably did not gain much information from asking WA "would it be better to invest $100 in GOOG or FB in 2013?", but the `FinancialData` function for pulling end-of-day stock prices enabled these people to do interesting analysis that they couldn't have done otherwise.

(source: conjecture, but I did work at WR for 3 years and on the initial Wolfram|Alpha release)

gfodor · 4 years ago

What was your experience at WR? I’m curious what the sentiment is towards the new physics work by those who work there, do you stay in touch?

primitivesuave · 4 years ago

Overall very positive, Stephen is a brilliant visionary and the software (Mathematica back then) was the best thing for someone early in their career to work on. Some of the ideas I picked up around symbolic computing and functional programming were quite helpful later on, and the whole experience opened some doors that wouldn't have otherwise. It's almost been a decade, so I unfortunately don't have much insight into sentiment these days.

antattack · 4 years ago

"how many 3mm circles pack in 15mm circle"

WA offers answers with drawings. Google cannot do that.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+3mm+circles+p...

varenc · 4 years ago

Of course if you try the query with spheres you see Wolfram Alpha's typical catatrophic failure.

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...

kragen · 4 years ago

For most of these, Wolfram Vertical Line Alpha seems to give reasonable results. However, for the third one, because I'm in Argentina, it helpfully converts US$79.80 into Argentine pesos, getting an answer that's off by about a factor of 2: AR$7969.44. As https://preciodolarblue.com.ar/ explains, the current bid and ask prices for the dollar are AR$195 and AR$199. Wolfram Vertical Line Alpha is apparently using the "official" rate of AR$99.45 or so; this is the rate at which the government converts your dollars into pesos if you are an exporter, but you cannot convert your pesos into dollars at this rate without special permission, granted, for example, if you are going on vacation to Disney World.

germanjoey · 4 years ago

You're severely underselling Google's incapability, e.g. https://i.imgur.com/UoIZSU2.png

dylan604 · 4 years ago

WTactualF? When has * ever been anything other than multiplication? Why would the resulting links all be discussing division?

krisoft · 4 years ago

I don’t understand the problem. You are asking what is 48*6, and the correct answer is right at the top.

hawkjo · 4 years ago

This is amazing! The rest of this thread completely buried the lead. Delightful.

chadcmulligan · 4 years ago

Hope I'm not sounding like a grammar nazi but its "buried the lede" I only recently discovered - the reason is really interesting - https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-...

pugworthy · 4 years ago

Curiously it can't calculate it if you change 15mm circle to 15mm square.

ivan_ah · 4 years ago

For me, I never got into using it much (due to lack of experience with Mathematica syntax). I had some niche uses like "how many work days between <date1> and <date2>" but that's hardly so important.

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).

dmlerner · 4 years ago

Sympy live shell is decent, and the latex rendering is pretty sweet. But, it's on ancient versions of everything, runs slowly, and has a C- UI.

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...

neltnerb · 4 years ago

What do you mean? I used it to solve a nasty impedance network for the real and imaginary components yesterday and the solutions were accurate.

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.

zandorg · 4 years ago

My meaning was just that I saw it sometimes referenced on HN, but I haven't seen it mentioned for a while now. Hence my search and results showing 8 years since.

I guess what I should be doing is looking at the Alexa ranking of Wolfram Alpha.

pvg · 4 years ago

You should search comments, rather than stories. It's very regularly referenced in HN comments, often for calculations, sometimes in other contexts.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

dylan604 · 4 years ago

They're just serving up answers which is boring to HN readers. Where's the drama in collecting data privately? Where's the drama from censoring results? No drama == No interest? Gawd, I have become cynical.

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GeorgeTirebiter · 4 years ago

Could please share your query / code to do this? Seems like it would make a good Example. Thanks!

neltnerb · 4 years ago

This is for two pairs of R/C in series ( R||C + R||C ).

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.