[vox] very cool web site

[timriley at appahost.com]

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [vox] very cool web site
> From: "evesautomotive" <evesautomotive at wavecable.com>
> Date: Thu, July 29, 2010 8:45 pm
> To: LUGOD's general discussion mailing list <vox at lists.lugod.org>
> 
> 
> This is exactly why the video should be watched.  maybe I 
> shouldn't have compared it to Google.

It seems like Wolfram is taking their Mathematica product,
see http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematicahomeedition/ ,
and moving some of its features online. So I wouldn't expect
it to work like a Google search engine. WolframAlpha's (the
online service's) prompt says, "Enter what you want to
calculate or know about." Mathematica is performing the
"calculate" part. I suspect the "know about" part is
Wolfram's database of statistics. The algorithm seems
to run what you type through an English parser, then
it queries its database and performs the arithmetic.

I typed in "population of California", and it returned
36.96 million (2009). Then I typed in "GDP of
California", and it returned $1.847 trillion per year.
So far so good. But when I typed in "fraction of california
GDP over world GDP", it didn't work. But give them
time.

<snip>