Steve Erbach
erbachs at gmail.com
Thu May 21 06:53:47 CDT 2009
Gustav, In the days since, I haven't noticed that it's slow except for a few queries where I saw a skinny progress bar appear. Normally now the answer is returned quite quickly. I haven't done much beyond the playing stage, though. For instance, I found that there's a limit to the number of sides of a regular polygon it will display. If you type in "30-gon" you'll be shown a "visual representation" of the shape as well as a nifty "Diagonals" plot. But if you go up to 31-gon all you'll get will be a text description. I've been following the Wolfram|Alpha Facebook discussion as well as the blog. I've lusted after Mathematica for years and played with a few of the demo versions. I bought Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" and even wrote an Access routine using Steve Lebans' graphics library to produce one of the automatons in that book. So, I've been a Wolfram fan for some time and I hope that Wolfram|Alpha does very well. Steve Erbach Neenah, WI On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 12:51 PM, Gustav Brock <Gustav at cactus.dk> wrote: > Hi Steve (switched channel) > > Yes, it is slow. > However, the knowledge of this incredible machine has limits, though hard to believe. > I'm a bit proud I found one item it doesn't know of: Cartesian (product or join). That is somewhat weird, as this is well-known in mathematics: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_product > > In SQL, this returns every possible combination of records from two or more tables: > > Select > TableA.*, > TableB.* > From > TableA, > TableB > > /gustav > > >>>> erbachs at gmail.com 16-05-2009 19:30 >>> > Gustav, > > I hear you about the heavy load. In the past few hours I'd say that > 25% of my queries get the "Sorry Dave!" warning about over capacity. > > Steve Erbach > > On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 3:44 AM, Gustav Brock <Gustav at cactus.dk> wrote: >> Hi Steve >> >> Thanks! >> This could be extremely useful at a high level - though currently the site seams to be under heavy load ... >> >> /gustav >> >>>>> erbachs at gmail.com 16-05-2009 06:44 >>> >> Dear Group, >> >> I watched the live launch webcast of Wolfram|Alpha tonight from about >> 7:30-10:30 CDT. It is online now, though the official launch date is >> Monday: >> >> www.wolframalpha.com >> >> One of the first queries I typed in was: "circumference of the milky >> way in cm". Wolfram|Alpha gave me the answer, whereas a Google search >> just gave me a list of Milky Way web sites.