Wolfram Apha Update – “13 coin flips, 12 heads”

This is exciting stuff….or maybe not. Depends where you stand on the issue of systems intelligence.

Try it: “13 coin flips, 12 heads”

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=13+coin+flips+12+heads

The web is about input and output, or should I really say, the computer is about input and output. After all the web is just a load of interconnected computers… so lets look at most important part of the computer, the input box.

Fundamentally, how we use and what we expect to come from the use of the input box, whether entering our credit card details, searching for postal addresses, looking for film times, alters the base function of the web. So why is WA so different and exciting? Well it fundamentally alters the base function of that input box. We are moved from asking what do you know about the data, to what can you understand from using the data.

Why does that matter? Well, if you ask Google how many coin flips will come up heads, you are at a loss unless someone has worked the specific problem out, worked the solution into a web page and then made the page accessible to the Internet. Then you have to hope that Google has crawled that page and indexed it correctly. That’s quite a lot of hoping to answer a relatively simple probability question (for maths geeks anyway). Along with the human intervention needed to answer your question, there is the added issue that the person might have got it wrong!

WA will look at what you have put into the input box (in this case “13 coin flips, 12 heads”) and do all the work for you, based on the data and methods it has available. Exciting eh!

Well, maybe not, its not a huge leap, as Google does do a lot of computing on the fly already, but it is a significant one. Up till now, we have been using computers as glorified librarians, from here on in we can use them as teachers, to tell us more about the world we live in than we already know.