Wolfram|Alpha: Could be a replacement of Wiki?

An innovative “answering machine”, namely Wolfram|Alpha has just been launched last night. To sum up the whole site, you can type in just about any questions, and it will return an appropriate answer. Join us in a short trip of this wonderful site.

Wolfram|Alpha has a really simple, easy-to-use interface. What makes it even greater is that it does not have any ads or annoying sponsor links (although, I am not sure how long that will last)

I typed in a function “x^2″ as the query, and it shows me a graph, the figure of graph, and a whole bunch of information that I don’t even know. Wow! It can be a replacement to Microsoft Math too?

Query = “Swine flu death”, and it really did show me the number of deaths up to now – 69…. and a graph, too! Impressive! After watching the introduction video and finding out how powerful it is, I decided not only to play around with its basic functions, but some really tricky ones to see how “Smart” it is.

I typed in “500th digit of pi” to find out… well, the 500th digit of pi. However, the answer returned was pi with 500 decimals…. Well, in a way I got my 500th digit, but, well…

Let’s see if it can recognize some mathematical words… I typed natural log 2, hoping that it will recognize as ln(2), but it totally ignored my “natural”.

Okay.. I am just bored and decided to search for my name. Wow.

Conclusion

So can Wolfram Alpha replace Google or Wikipedia? At the moment, I have my doubts. Some information, such as Population of Hong Kong are somehwat outdated. This public beta is certainly awesome, and can’t wait to see more of it!