But it also always translates what it thought you meant into the precise, formal language and displays that so that you can tell whether it got it right. When the computer can work out what you mean, it does. Basically, it's provided as an alternative to a more precise input language, one that works a lot of the time and when it does requires less effort by the user. I think that they've hit on an excellent way of making imperfect freeform linguistics very useful. People don't like it when you break their models or crap on them. When they do provide a control, it's very well defined for instance searching for "site: ", which always work the way you expect it to.įundamentally, Google lets you build a model in your head of how their tool works, even if there's a gray unknown area where the results are as an example, when you throw a ball, you have a mental model of how Newtonian physics works, so you have a general idea of where the ball is going to end up.Īlpha makes you think you're building a model, and then the model breaks somehow - like if when you threw a ball, it occasionally turned into a dove and crapped on you. You don't expect anything beyond a certain probabilistic accuracy, so you don't form any control mappings beyond a general "if I search for I'll get results related to ". You just get something that's kinda sorta like what you wanted. Google, on the other hand, doesn't do any of that shit. Then it turns out that this control mapping doesn't actually exist, which is incredibly frustrating. ![]() Unfortunately, because of this, you can't form a mapping between input -> output - in your example, for instance, you thought that "tensile strength of " would give consistent results, so you formed a mapping in your head ("tensile strength of results in the tensile strength of a material"). Fundamentally, the Alpha control interface tries to be intelligent when it works, it's nice, but when it doesn't its output is not consistent. ![]() There's a really good blog post here about why Wolfram Alpha is really hard to use.
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