[search] Wolfram Alpha … The Search Engine Of Choice for Supervillains … Who is Clark Kent? … Who is Bruce Wayne? … Who is Peter Parker? …
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The fact that a supervillian would have to be suspicious of any of these alter egos to back-engineer their alternate identities is exactly where Wolfram|Alpha goes wrong. You have to know the answer, or at least suspect it, to confirm it.
Limited datasets, erroneous results and the uptime of a trampolinist all have me reaching for the richer content worlds of underworld snitches Google and Wikipedia.
If Wolfram|Alpha was an app for my PDA or iPhone then fair enough, it’s limited but cute in what it purports to do. But as a serious tool for research it is abhorrent and has a long way to go before it can be ‘useful’.
For the moment I’ll keep to my scientific calculator for graphs, Google for finding spreadsheets and datasets and Wikipedia for general info.
Comment by Scott — May 17, 2009 @ 12:56 pm
Me too, for the simple reason that I’m happy with Google and Wikipedia.
Comment by Albi — May 23, 2009 @ 8:40 pm