The secret weapon that has allowed us, and no one else, to assemble such a vast library of algorithms, in such a diverse range of fields, is Mathematica. Some are as simple as the quadratic formula others are among the most sophisticated intellectual endeavors of our time.
But nevertheless, enabling Wolfram|Alpha to do real, serious computations, covering a wide range of subject matters, required implementing literally tens of thousands of algorithms. Of course many can be reused: units conversion or orbital mechanics, once implemented, can cover any unit or any planet. It may not be rocket science, but it sure is nice to have someone do the grunt work for you.Įach such computation requires a specific algorithm, and each of those algorithms has to be explicitly created. But turning that generic information into the actual total calories for a specific recipe requires computation, first unit conversions (cups of flour into grams of flour, “one egg” into the default weight of a standard egg, etc.), then computation to multiply out the calories per ingredient and add them up. The underlying data are the calories per gram of each of the ingredients. It’s rocket science, if you will.įor a more down-to-earth example, consider the number of calories in a recipe. The actual distance is a figure that can be arrived at only by computation based on the moon’s known orbital parameters. If you ask Wolfram|Alpha the distance to the moon, it tells you not only the conventionally quoted average distance, but also the actual distance right now, which can at times be well over ten thousand miles off the average. Why wrong? Because the distance from the earth to the moon is not constant: it changes by as much as a mile a minute. To give an amusing example, every school child has at one time or another written a report on the moon, and they probably included the wrong figure for how far the moon is from the earth.
Why does computation matter? Because computation is what turns generic information into specific answers.
The thing that truly sets Wolfram|Alpha apart is that it is able to do sophisticated computations for you, both pure computations involving numbers or formulas you enter, and computations applied automatically to data called up from its repositories. Although it’s tempting to think of Wolfram|Alpha as a place to look up facts, that’s only part of the story.
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