Wolfram Alpha stumped by cricket

So, the team at Broadsight Towers has been playing with Wolfram Alpha this morning following its public release ( We were not considered worthy of reviewing it in Beta, after all what do guys who built real time semantic search engines know ). It did return the correct response to "the meaning of life" (42) as well as:

- London New York”
- Position of Hubble
- Weight of a proton

Update - Dave notes that more accurately, it showed where Google's limits are:

- The top Google search for “position of Hubble” gives a NASA readout of the current lat/long, no diff there
- For “London New York”, Google gives lots of airline links and ads. In fact, that’s my main gripe with Google – results are often swamped with advertising links.
- For “weight of a proton”, Google gives a direct link to the answer, but doesn’t do the multiplication.

We also tried to search for the distance from the Canaries to Tobago (Andy being a keen sailor) ... it tried to give lots of info about the birds then about a place in Africa and finally (probably when we got the Spanish spelling correct – Gran Canaria) it gave in and told us the answer. (Incidentally, Google’s 4th answer was a correct interpretation of the question – but the wrong distance as it gave the distance to Costa Rica.! It was a flying info site, so we guess there is no direct flight on the route wanted !)

Encouraged, but thinking that before it overcame Google, it first needs to overcome the Googly, we threw it at Cricket, the ultimate test of semantic corkscrewing:

- Explain LBW - "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."
- Laws of cricket - "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."
- Who won the cricket world cup? - "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."

Not so good.

Google, of course, got the correct answers (Or rather pointed to them) - here are "The Laws of Cricket" for example.

- You have two sides, one out in the field and one in.
- Each player that’s in the side that’s in, goes out, and when he’s out, he comes in and the next player goes in until he’s out.
- When they are all out the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out.
- Sometimes you get players still in and not out.
- When both sides have been in and out including the not-outs, that’s the end of the game.

Simple, see

We think it’s trying to infer semantic connections from content in web pages. However, a true “semantic web” would explicitly mark up the semantic meanings during the authoring process, and this short-cut is a slip and will put it on a sticky wicket in future.

In fact, we suspect that Google will be bowled over by something coming from left field, but no doubt the whole new search thing will run and run.....

Update - our semantic search fundi Paul Lancefield has been giving it the Turing treatment over here

Update - the US has woken up, responses not too positive so far.... but then its hard to know who is a neutral there.