Walking Randomly

I’m usually a big fan of Wolfram Research and their products but on reading the news that they had released a $50 iPhone app that hooked in to the Wolfram Alpha website I wondered if they had taken leave of their senses.  Let’s see why…
Wolfram Alpha is a web service that is based on the [...]

I stumbled across this website via one of my friend’s twitter feeds and it made me smile.  Not everyone is impressed with Wolfram Alpha it seems

Up until now I have been using Wolfram Alpha as the ultimate geek toy and have been truly delighted with it but I thought it was high time I tried to consider how one might use it more seriously.  So I set myself a task.  Nothing too complicated you understand , after all I am [...]

An algebraic surface is a set of solutions to the general equation f(x,y,z)=0 where f is a polynomial in the variables x,y and z.  For example if you set f to the following polynomial

then the set of points x,y and z that satisfy f(x,y,z)=0 forms a sphere of radius 1.  You can get much more [...]

I apologise to any of my regular readers who may be tired of all of the Wolfram Alpha updates but I am pulling an all-nighter at the office and whenever I find myself waiting for my main computer to finish what it is doing, I end up feeding queries to Wolfram Alpha.
From the beginning, I [...]

Give or take a few hundred seconds I will be 1 billion seconds old on September 2nd 2009 and there will be a celebration   Using Wolfram Alpha you can easily find out when you will be (or were) 1 billion seconds old simply by doing a query like
1 billion seconds from 18 May [...]

I saw a tweet from someone this morning which mentioned that you could plot the Julia Set using Wolfram Alpha.  I had to try this for myself as soon as I could and, sure enough, you can plot the Julia set for any complex number Z: -0.765+0.003 I for example.

Very nice but what else can [...]

I was geeking out majorly yesterday while watching the new Star Trek movie with some friends and we got around to discussing Wolfram Alpha a fair bit (well, I was doing most of the talking to be honest – I’d had a LOT of coffee).
As I was explaining what it could and couldn’t do – [...]

If you are a developer and want to get your hands dirty with Wolfram Alpha – here is a link to the API documentation:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/developers.html
Not had chance to read it myself yet (in the middle of cooking for a dinner party) but would be interested in people’s thoughts.

I’m impressed! That sums up my initial feelings when I first started playing with Wolfram Alpha. As I played with it some more though it became apparent that this was wonderful project still needs a little work.
I knew that my friend Maria would get a crack at using Wolfram Alpha before I did [...]