Sunday, May 17, 2009

Wolfram|Alpha only half-intelligent

There are numerous posts about the failure of the "computational knowledge engine" Wolfram|Alpha, just launched.

I don't consider it a failure - at least not yet.

However, one thing that I noticed: they tend to be very intelligent around your input and interpret it in the most meaningful way...

Still - they failed on an easy one.

Try to enter an ambiguous date like "4.5.1980" to find everything for May 4th, 1980... at least that's what you'd expect when you are in central europe (or more generally speaking: outside the U.S.)
Wolfram|Alpha's interpretation, however, is April 5th. ... well, that's not to uncommon for U.S.-centric sites.

What strikes me as odd, is that on the very same page, they show me the weather for Vienna, Austria for that day... nice feature... Yet, they are telling me, that they exactly know that I'm not from the U.S. and the date should be interpreted as a European date, i.e. day.month.year and not the other way round.

Guys, how could you miss that one???

1 comment:

jimpurdy1943@yahoo.com said...

That's an interesting little quirky thing about the Austria-US disconnect.