With WolframAlpha launched on Friday, I spent much of my weekend trying to get a 'computable request' to compute. Not until Monday morning did a request compute – but its performance has been getting better ever since so hopefully we will all have more time to experiment with it over coming days and weeks...
Like me, Gwenda Mynott has been testing WolframAlpha and has been searching for things that, a) you have a good knowledge of, and, b) a topic that WolframAlpha can easily compute. Places are good for this (e.g. countries, towns, cities, etc.), and Stephen Wolfram computes multiple locations to good effect in his demonstrations; however, Gwenda tried to 'compute' Wales and arrived at some bizarre results. Check them out. WolframAlpha doesn't retrieve data pertaining to the constituent nation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (i.e. Wales as you or I would tend to know it!), but a small town in South Yorkshire by the name of Wales (?) The only other obvious option WolframAlpha provides is Wales (New York, USA), which is equally amiss.
Hmmmmm. If this is the result for Wales, what are the results for the rest of the UK? Well, that's equally controversial. England appears to be synonymous with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Scotland is referred by WolframAlpha back to the Kingdom of Scotland, which ceased to exist after the Act of Union in 1707. Worse than that, Northern Ireland doesn't even exist! ("WolframAlpha isn't sure what to do with your input") Cornish nationalists will also be dismayed to learn that Cornwall (Canada) is the only one that counts.
Is this a systematic attempt to erase the history, culture and memory of the Celtic fringes?! Of course not. The results might be strange, but from a knowledge engine point of view – and ontologically speaking - Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are subsumed by the larger geographical and political entity of the UK, so it's understandable that WolframAlpha computes the answer in this way. Still, the England/UK synonymy is a bit odd and must have been encoded by someone somewhere sometime!
Experiment away, folks - and I would encourage everyone to post their most bizarre / illogical data results as comments to this blog. A prize will go to the most outlandish!
The Celtic fringe blog got Keith Trickey and me wondering about Where exactly WolframAlpha gets its data, and how does it structure it at the back end? Bobbie Johnson at the Guardian has obviously been wondering the same. He has published an article in the Guardian today answering our first question. I knew library data and scientific data sets were part of the picture (because Stephen Wolfram told us that part, but we actually get a few names in this article. There are also a few 'obvious' data sources which I never even considered, such as the CIA World Factbook...
ReplyDeleteAfter revisiting WolframAlpha, it would seem that it has now corrected some of these data issues. Northern Ireland and Wales actually exist now! Well done WolframAlpha! George
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