Intro to WolframAlpha with Stephen Wolfram (Part One)

Hello, I’m Stephen Wolfram and I’d like to give you a quick introduction to Wolfram|Alpha. Wolfram|Alpha is really a very ambitious and long-term project, which in many ways is just getting started. Let me show you a little bit of what you can already do with Wolfram|Alpha today. The basic idea of Wolfram|Alpha is very simple, you type your input, your question and Wolfram|Alpha produces a result. Let’s try something really easy. Okay, that’s good. Now let’s try something harder, how about some serious math? You can type things in, pretty much however you want. Here’s what Wolfram|Alpha produces, it’s done the integral and then it’s showing us other things that it thinks we’ll be interested in. How about something more real world? Let’s ask it the GDP of France. Here’s the result and then it gives a plot of the history and so on. We can dress up the question a bit if we want. We can say, what is the GDP of France? Same result. Let’s try this, what is the GPD of France/Italy. We as humans can tell what this is asking and so can Wolfram|Alpha and it gives us the result. But this is really making use of the fact that the data in Wolfram|Alpha is organized so that it can actually be computed with. Okay, let’s try something different, how about, internet users in Europe? Now Wolfram|Alpha is going to take what it knows and summarize it for us, with a table and some graphs and so on. Alright, how about some Geography? Let’s ask about Springfield. Well, there are lots of Springfields in the world but Wolfram|Alpha knows from GOIP, from the internet address it sees for me, that I happen to be in Massachusetts right now, so it assumes that I mean the Springfield that’s in Massachusetts. Of course, I could pick one of the others too. Here it’s giving me all sorts of information about Springfield, Massachusetts, like, what cities it’s near, And I could always drill down and see more if I’d like. It’s also showing me things like, the current weather in Springfield, and perhaps I can ask more detail about the weather. So here’s the current weather and this is the temperature as a function of time for the past week. That’s a forecast. Down here is the cloud cover and so on. Well we can look, let’s say for the last 10 years as well. There’s a plot of the temperature as a function of time for the past 10 years in Springfield. We can see that it’s warmer in the summer, colder in the winter and so on. Let’s try asking a more specific question. How about the weather in Springfield on 11/6/89? It knows I’m in the U.S. so it interprets that date as a month, day, year date and gives us the results here. Let’s try something even more complicated, let’s ask the weather in Springfield when David Ortiz was born. So Wolfram|Alpha will have to think for a little while, but then, there, it gives us the result. Let’s try something completely different. How about, 5 mile/sec? So Wolfram|Alpha here tells us about useful unit conversions, then it gives us various comparisons that helps us understand this quantity. Or how about $17/hr? Now Wolfram|Alpha will give us a bunch of conversions it thinks are useful for absolute time, for working time and so on. Or how about 6000c? So Wolfram|Alpha will assume that we’re talking about temperature here. It'll give us some conversions, then it’ll show us the color that something heated to 6000 degrees would be. Let’s try 6000 words. Now Wolfram|Alpha is telling us things about 6000 words, like how long it would take to type that or read it. How about 33g of gold? Now Wolfram|Alpha is telling us things like, how big of sphere of material that would be or what the current commodity price for that would be or all sorts of scientific data. Well let’s say we’re doing chemistry. We can figure out what happens if we ask, let’s say, for 2.5 molar H2SO4? It can figure out properties of that, how to make it and so on. Here’s an engineering computation, working out the properties of water at 2.5 atm pressure and 200C. Well let’s try another area, how about medicine? Well there’s a medical test result and Wolfram|Alpha is using a large public health study to tell us where that result lies in the population or we can be more specific. Let’s ask it where an LDL level of 150 would lie for a smoker, male, age 40 and now Wolfram|Alpha will slice down and tell us about that particular subpopulation. Or let’s try asking about the correlation of an LDL test with a different test for that same subpopulation. So now Wolfram|Alpha will have to think for a moment, then gives us the result, and in the particular case we see that there isn’t much correlation between those tests. Or let’s try something different here. Let’s ask about the life expectancy for a 40 year old male in Finland. First Wolfram|Alpha gives us just the plain result, but then it’s computing all sorts of details and there’s a whole history of life expectancy over the past 100 years, for example. How about another health related thing, let’s give it a height and weight? That gives us some basic data and some not so basic data. Let’s ask about, let’s say, some exercise we might take. Let’s say, running 4 mph 30 minutes . and then give our height and weight and age and gender. There’s quite a lot of detail here that we can drill down to see. Okay, how about this, let’s type in a sequence of letters, Wolfram|Alpha will assume here that this is a genome sequence and it’ll look up where that particular sequence occurs on the human genome. How about, let’s pick one of those genes, let’s pick this one here and now we can ask about that gene. Or we could go into more detail, we can ask what’s on the genome 500 base pairs upstream of that particular gene? And now Wolfram|Alpha can dive back into the genome and figure that out. How about something completely different? How about finance? There’s a ticker symbol and there’s all sorts of detail about that particular company. Okay, let me try entering a second company as well. Now here’s a typical thing about Woflram|Alpha, if you enter several things of the same type it’ll give you comparisons between them. There’s all sorts of quant level detail that Wolfram|Alpha gives in this particular case. How about another simple financial computation? Let’s say a mortgage 5%, 30 years. Wolfram|Alpha will now have to fill in a loan amount. We can change that loan amount if we’d like to, let's say, 10,000 euros. Now Wolfram|Alpha can calculate everything about that mortgage and give us a payment table and all sorts of other things. How about asking about a bond? Wolfram|Alpha can do all kinds of financial computations and all sorts of other computations too, like here’s an engineering computation. This is working out about an airfoil and here’s Wolfram|Alpha computing how fluid would flow around that airfoil, and there’s the result. How about a completely different kind of computation? How about a computation involving colors? Let’s say we ask Wolfram|Alpha what’s red + yellow? Wolfram|Alpha will tell us the blend is orange. Another computation, let’s ask about D# minor. We can go ahead and ask Wolfram|Alpha to play that scale. How about a website? And we can go a drill down and look at history and so on. Or something completely different, let’s ask about high school teacher median wages and it’ll give me the result for the U.S. here and show me a plot of history and so on.