It definitely still has a long way to go. For example, it cannot understand area Pittsburgh / area Kanazawa or population density Pittsburgh / population density Kanazawa which seems less complex than the above queries. Alpha is, however, aware of the populations of each city.
So there's a small bug when you look at France. Also, it took trial and error to get a query that actually worked. (ex: comparing debt / pop / LE between multiple countries instead of debt / pop leads to more bugs)
us debt / us population / us life expectancy in days
What does that mean, to you, in everyday language? I see what WolframAlpha did with that, but what is the implication of that answer for a real-world concern?
Comments
Using it, you can tell there is some huge potential.
For example, these nifty queries:
us debt / us population / us life expectancy in days
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+debt+%2F+us+populati...
and
(MSFT net income / MSFT employees)
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28MSFT+net+income+%2F+...
It definitely still has a long way to go. For example, it cannot understand area Pittsburgh / area Kanazawa or population density Pittsburgh / population density Kanazawa which seems less complex than the above queries. Alpha is, however, aware of the populations of each city.
It still needs work for more complex queries:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=debt+%2F+pop++japan%2C+...
So there's a small bug when you look at France. Also, it took trial and error to get a query that actually worked. (ex: comparing debt / pop / LE between multiple countries instead of debt / pop leads to more bugs)
us debt / us population / us life expectancy in days
What does that mean, to you, in everyday language? I see what WolframAlpha did with that, but what is the implication of that answer for a real-world concern?
It is the amount of debt each American has to pay off each day.
Except, you know, it isn't.
Assuming zero interest :-)
Now if we could tell it to consider interest then I would be impressed.
You'd need an interest function. Use historical data? Specify a regression? Have it try to calculate last average?
Even then, you'd need to have some objective value of worth to understand what $0.92 means. Right now, it only measures the value of the dollar. :-/
Some kind of debt slavery calculation? :)