New tech fail
Monday, May 18th, 2009 06:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caddymanHmm.
What can I say? I tried out the new Wolfram Alpha search engine, having found it mentioned on the BBC, here.
The first thing I did was enter my date of birth; it suggests newbies enter a date just to see how a computation knowledge engine as they like to call it works. Well, so far so good. It told me a number of numerical facts about my date of birth, ie it was the 35th day of 1959 (how useful, I couldn't add four to thirty-one) and a few other equally useful odds and sods. A couple of people I hadn't heard of shared that birthdate, so I looked for one of them. Wolphram Alpha cheerfully told me it didn't know what to do with the data I'd entered, so I trimmed it down a bit. Twice. Then I tried another, completely different query and got this:
The system isn't having a good first day...
What can I say? I tried out the new Wolfram Alpha search engine, having found it mentioned on the BBC, here.
The first thing I did was enter my date of birth; it suggests newbies enter a date just to see how a computation knowledge engine as they like to call it works. Well, so far so good. It told me a number of numerical facts about my date of birth, ie it was the 35th day of 1959 (how useful, I couldn't add four to thirty-one) and a few other equally useful odds and sods. A couple of people I hadn't heard of shared that birthdate, so I looked for one of them. Wolphram Alpha cheerfully told me it didn't know what to do with the data I'd entered, so I trimmed it down a bit. Twice. Then I tried another, completely different query and got this:
The system isn't having a good first day...