Intro to WolframAlpha with Stephen Wolfram (Part One)
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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.