Wolfram Alpha
Sunday, May 24th, 2009Stephen Wolfram, the guy behind the software Mathematica, has launched something called Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha is a kind of search engine with a very ambitious goal; in their own words: “Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, andalgorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.” Ambitious indeed.
Typing in “Matrix”, the result is a help page on matrix computations, i.e., one can compute the trace, determinant, eigenvalue, etc about a specific matrix typed in, in a Mathematica-like syntax. The output for a specific matrix is a colorplot of the matrix along with the computed trace, determinant, eigenvalues, eigenvectors and inverse.
Entering positive definite, Hadamard matrix or covariance matrix, Wolfram Alpha doesn’t find anything, which means that Wolfram Alpha is either in a beta stage or is not very focussed on matrix matters.
In contrast to Google, Wolfram Alpha can compute results and present them with graphs which is a major step forward and places Wolfram Alpha as more of a knowledge gateway than a search engine. But there seem to be quite a gap from the ambitions and the present level of completeness.