<Begin copy-paste> Innovation: The dizzying ambition of Wolfram Alpha
New Scientist Tech, Nov. 17, 2009 Stephen Wolfram wants Wolfram Alpha to generate knowledge of its own. Alpha has been exposed to more utterances than a typical child would hear in learning a new language, allowing it to get smarter at understanding how people phrase their requests, he says. "You'll be able to ask it a question, and instead of it using knowledge that came out of a method invented 50 years ago it will invent a new method on the fly to answer it." http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18163-innovation-the-dizzying-ambition-of-wolfram-alpha.html (from http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.html?main=news_single.html?id%3D11413) Bing teams up with Wolfram Alpha http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8356217.stm </end copy-paste> I think competition is a good thing because it makes everyone work harder to be best. I would like to see Sage accessible through Google. =) Kevin Stueve On Nov 19, 3:42 am, "Dr. David Kirkby" <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > If you believe what Wolfram Research say, there are several million > Mathematica > users. See for example > > http://www.wolfram-media.com/products/mathematicabook.html > > where it says about a book: > > "The definitive reference and tutorial for several million enthusiastic > Mathematica users around the world" > > There are several things that make me question the truth of this. One, > admittedly not very sophisticated metric, suggests the number of *active* > Mathematica users might be only 1.71 that of Sage! > > First, why do I not believe this several million number? > > 1) As an engineer, working in several companies over the years, I've seen very > little usage of it. Plenty in academia, but little outside. > > 2) Do a job search on monster.com and see how many jobs require Mathematica > knowledge. Then compare it to MATLAB, and you will find far more companies > want > MATLAB skills than want Mathematica. If there were several million users, I > would expect to be able to find lots of jobs requiring Mathematica skills. > > 3) WRI come out with a lot of ****, like for example that publishing a > 'Demonstration' on > > http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/index.html > > counts as an academic publication! See the FAQ at > > http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/FAQ.html > > where it says: > > --------------------------------------------------- > Question. Do Demonstrations count as academic publications? > > Answer. Yes. Every Demonstration undergoes a rigorous review process that > checks > for quality, clarity, and accuracy, so you can count them as academic > publications. > > --------------------------------------------------- > > It sure would be easy to get a lot of publications and a chair if one could > write papers as simple as this demo! > > http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/SineAndCosineGraphGenerator/ > > So how can one judge the popularity of Sage vs Mathematica? Well, given they > both have one main public support forum: > > Sage - sage-supp...@googlegroups.com > Mathematica - comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica > > a comparison of the number of recent posts to these forums might give us a > clue. > (Can anyone find a better way? Is this a totally flawed metric?). > > As a test, I logged into Google groups about 10 days ago and quickly looked at > both the sage-supp...@googlegroups.com and comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica > lists. > When you do this, Google set the time of "Last Visit" to zero and the number > of > "New Items" back to zero. Some time later, you can see when you last looked, > and > how many posts there have been since. > > Here's a screen shot. > > http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/kirkby/Mathematica-vs-Sage/mathe... > > The number of new posts in this period, which was about 10 days, but I can't > be > sure exactly, are: > > comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica 194 > sage-supp...@googlegroups.com 113 > > That's a Mathematica/Sage ratio of 1.71 > > That's not a huge difference. If Mathematica has several million enthusiastic > users, then Sage should have more than one million, which I very much doubt! > > There are clearly problems with a direct comparison like this. It's clearly > not > a rigorous statistic. > > * Mathematica users can email supp...@wolfram.com, but with a turnaround time > of > a few days, it is not very useful for quick questions/answers. > > * Since comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica is moderated, some people do ask their > questions in sci.math.symoblic too. But there are not that many Mathematica > questions there, so I do not believe that distorts the number a lot. > > * Perhaps Mathematica is so easy to use, few users need support. In contrast > Sage is so hard to use, that a higher percentage of users need to ask for > support. Personally I do not believe this to be so. > > PS, you can't make similar assumptions about Solaris/HP-UX/AIX as all of them > have other major public supports forums. But Sage and Mathematica do not, so a > direct comparison of new posts, while not perfect, gives us at least a clue. > > It will be interesting to see how that ratio changes over time. I might set up > another google account, register both groups, but never read them. That will > allow us see how these numbers changes over time. > > Dave -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
