A new tool?

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Announcement
There’s some hype at the moment about WolframAlpha, a “computational knowledge engine” which, judging by some of the videos, can do some very clever things. It goes live at midnight UTC tonight. The information currently available implies that it’s got some crossword search-style facilities, and I’m guessing there must be a dictionary or thesaurus in there somewhere, but the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. Judging by the amount of kit shown in the videos, how it’s will make any money is a mystery in the usual internet start-up fashion. If I see that it can do useful stuff for crossword solvers I’ll be putting some links to it in my reports.

They’re by no means the only people chasing the holy grail of “something more intelligent than Google” (my interpretation) – William Tunstall-Pedoe, whose products have made anagrams for Dan Brown and solved most if not all of a newspaper crossword, is also beavering away on True Knowledge.

We’re away at the webless in-laws for a couple of days, so I’ll have to wait to try it, but change of plan! – I’ll have a look over the weekend. If you see anything nifty for xwd-solving purposes leave a comment here.

4 comments on “A new tool?”

  1. It looks pretty impressive. I’ve not given it very much time so far, but an input of “anagram” throws up some very useful crosswordy tools.

    Maths is not my strongpoint so I’ll let others assess what WA is capable of on that front, but my gut instinct is that if it can give such useful results (which are nothing like what you’d expect from a Google-type engine) from this wordsmith’s input it’s going to be an extremely useful tool.

    1. There’s huge potential but there still seems a lot of work to do. You can ask for “sounds like piece” but the list of words you get is based on Soundex values. Soundex is very clever but now about 90 years old, and reckons that “pack” is a valid answer. (And when they’ve got identical pronunciations stored for some of these words (see “word peace”, and “word piece”), Soundex is not the only source of useful information.)

      The word puzzles section talks about word subsets and supersets, but as far as I can tell, “supersets” are not yet available. There are odd aspects of the user interface in general: getting a complete list out of the More / Less links can be pretty tedious (heaven knows what it does to their server!), and many results that you might want to use to show other Wolfram Alpha pages have to be saved to the clipboard and then used as input – which is the equivalent of Google just showing URLs instead of linking page titles to them.

      For the bits most likely to be useful for crosswords, you can see examples at Words and Linguistics and Word Puzzles.

      Edited at 2009-05-16 03:19 pm (UTC)

      1. Correction: supersets are there – you just have to remember to say “words containing abc” rather than “word superset abc” in the same style as “word subset abc”.
  2. Word definitions and synonyms are Wordnet 3. Wordweb Pro which uses Wordnet gives most of the functions provided.

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