Wolfram Alpha releases major update; keeps refining
Wolfram/Alpha, the service that's less of a Google-like search engine and more of a "computational knowledge engine" of information on the Internet, has undergone a major update, with more planned for the future. These updates, though, don't come in the form of a face lift or a new user interface. These are updates to the core code and data within the knowledge base. From the company's blog:
There’s new data flowing into Wolfram|Alpha every second. And we’re always working very hard to develop the core code and data for the system. In fact, internally, we have a complete new version of the system that’s built every day. But before we release this version for general use, we do extensive validation and testing...today, as one step in our ongoing, long-term development process, we’ve just made live the first broad updates to the core code and data of Wolfram|Alpha.
A full list of the updates are available on the blog post. Here are a few:
- Additional support for current and past fractional timezones (e.g. "Iran time")
- Additional probability computations for cards and coins (e.g. "2 or 3 aces")
- Combined time series plots of different quantities (e.g. "germany gdp vs population")
- Implicit handling of geometric figure properties (e.g. "ellipse with area 6 and major axis 2")
- Support for planet-to-planet distances and “nearest planet”, etc.
In all, the company released 1,850 "code commits" and changed 591 "code files." Overall, about 1.1 million data values were impacted in some way through the update, the company said.
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