Wolfram Alpha |
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Then rapid fire, "smallest man", "height of atmosphere", "distance to moon". Its the rapidity that gets me. No scanning, interpretation or collation. Just the answer. Bang!
My first thought when I heard of it was Cyc. But its not Cyc. Though Doug Lenat, CEO of the Cyc AI project, is said to be impressed. As with Cyc I wonder at how the human input element is going to limit its scope on queries that don't fit into a formula based upon more common inputs. For instance if you enter "gestation time of a human" you get 38 weeks. If you ask for the gestation time of any other animal it doesn't yet appear to have an answer. Still it will happily tell you the size of the smallest living fish, give you a complete list for "largest dinosaur" and give you a historical graph for "apple sales/dell sales". Along with Google, now a go to resource for me. For a screencast of a Stephen Wolfram using it check out:
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