If you incorporate results from Wolfram Alpha in any work without attribution meeting their standards you will have breached your TOS and they suggest you also will have committed copyright violations and academic plagiarism. If your work is not personal (unshared?) or academic, then they demand you negotiate a license.
Google seems happy to let you know sin(x) is wiggly and send you on your way.
Cool! The first thing I thought of when I looked at the Google one was that it'd be sweet if I could play that as a wave form. Anyway to make it play longer?
Adding positive comments doesn't usually add as much information. The story itself was a positive comment. Critical discussion is best done not by saying "hey, cool story" - that's what upvoting is for. There are some cases where a non-negative comment is great, like pointing other readers to an interesting piece of related information, but if all it does is confirm what the original submission said, it's less informative.
It seems like it does sometimes, but not at other items. I clicked around on the page a bit, then clicked on the search button, and suddenly it showed me the zero click info, which was hidden before.
I haven't used WolframAlpha that much for graphs but I've often been bothered by the lack of zoom, scale and pan which google seems to have solved quite nicely.
Hopefully WA will do something similar in the near future.
You can set axis ranges, which address some of the zoom issues. I've found this to be a bit tricky / iffy at best, particularly when using financial datasets.
They seem to have come with some nice algorithm to connect the graph dots. The problem: When you draw the graph using a naive formula putPixel(x, y(x)) you get isolated dots. Therefore you have to draw tiny lines between the points to get a nice smooth curve instead of isolated dots. But then there is the question of which points to connect – for example in tan(x) you can’t connect the last point on the ‘upper right hand’ with the first one coming from the bottom. This is surprisingly hard to solve simply (at least it was for me). Most packages simply resign – try zooming out a tan(x) to see the erroneous vertical connecting lines. Google does it right even in high zoom ratios. How do they do it?
"Try to pan or zoom the function to a different region. The plotting algorithm detected one of the following:
- Too many asymptotes
- Too many transitions of the function from defined to undefined regions
- Too many points on the graph that might not represent the function value currently due to high volatility"
It looks like can actually detect when their graphing algo starts to break down.
One way is to set a threshold for whether or not to join the dots, if it's above the threshold perform a search between those points to see if they are between the dots or if they diverge, this search can be complicated or simple, google seems to use a fair bit of cpu power when zooming out on tan(x) so I'm guessing they're using a search here rather than some alternative 'clever' induction from the nature of the curve itself.
If you're using a CAS in your graphing system you can probably decompose the function, identify potentially problematic components (e.g. tan(x^2/5+2x)), and identify asymptotes or undefined areas directly using a database of undefined-generating functions.
This would produce a list of X values for which the overall function is not defined. When your pixel plotting passes one or more of those X values, don't draw a line. If you pass several in a single pixel, give up.
The easy zooming and panning makes this a better graphing experience than any other calculator/software I have used so far. True, you don't have the capabilities of Mathematica available, but it seems to work great for graphing a single variable function.
This is something i don't understand why other mathematical tools do so badly. Have you tried navigating the graph in a matlab plot? You have to select one tool for zoom in and another tool for zoom out and then click the graph to get a huge zoom-step that isn't even centered around where you clicked. Then another tool for moving to the correct position and another to see the values. SERIOUSLY?!!?!!!! This is a super expensive tool designed for plotting and comparing graphs and the diagram-control stinks so bad. Implementing this feature properly is one day of work. Synchronizing dimensions of axis between different diagrams is also something very important that matlab has huge difficulties with. Mathematica isn't much better in this regard even though they at least plot with anti aliasing T_T.
Related is also navigation in maps-software. Not many programs do this right even though it's so simple.
Do you have Javascript turned off, in particular, google.com? Disallowing google.com only gives me search results. (gstatic.com is irrelevant, I think)
I use Wolfram Alpha to check if I solved my math assignments correctly. Can you solve e.g. limes with Google? I tried a couple of syntaxes but nothing.
Offtopic observation: when Wolframalpha first appeared everyone on sites like Reddit and HN were falling over eachother to explain, in detail, what kind of an arrogant d*ck & loser Stephen Wolfram really is. Ignoring the Wolframalpha product features and going directly for the person behind it and his book and so on. Now seems like everyone loves his product and, subsequently, never mentions the guy behind it anymore. Anyone else noticed that?
Not to say it is uncommon to call Stephen Wolfram egotistic, I swear there was a thread about Wolfram remembering Turing and people counting how many times Wolfram mentioned himself but it may have been killed as I can't find it.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x%5E2%2By%5E2