Wolfram Alpha

May 26 7:09pm

I’ve been giving the new Wolfram|Alpha a spin and like what I see. It’s not your regular old search engine and doesn’t serve that purpose well as many have pointed out. And it’s not supposed to as it’s more of a computation engine, and a powerful one at that. From the makers of Mathematica you would expect some sophisticated calculation ability and they deliver.

The best way to see what it can do is to simply play around with it by entering various inputs and seeing what it produces. As an engineer I can anticipate myself using it daily for the routine calculations, technical details, material properties and so on that would take me longer to obtain otherwise, and speed is crucial to doing innovative things.

It’s definitely an innovative technology and product but it’s hard to see what it’s impact will be in the future, whether it will rise beyond the user base of technically-minded people to something nearly everyone would use.