Does Wolfram Alpha Live up to the Hype?
May 18th, 2009
No. No it does not.
Update [June 14, 2011]: Entering “Conway’s Game of Life” into Wolfram Alpha now does provide you with information about the game. I suppose that means that it officially lives up to the hype.
To be fair, it’s still in early development and your query wasn’t in the right format. You should have been asking something like “smallest spaceship in conway’s game of life”… not that that returns results, but at least it has a numerical/factual answer which this should be able to fetch eventually. If you search for “chess”, it returns information on a plant too, you know.
Yeah, I was just surprised that it doesn’t have *any* information about Conway’s Game of Life, considering Wolfram is himself a cellular automaton guru. Entering things like “Rule 90” or “Rule 110” displays information about those cellular automata, but the most well-known automaton of all somehow didn’t make the cut.
Yes it does!
(Click the picture now)
@Cloudy197 – Thanks for the update 🙂