Having been burned by Wolfram's "New Kind of Science", I've not much faith in his claims for "Wolfram Alpha". This lack of confidence may be the reason why I found it useless for correlating atmospheric CO2 concentration with total world population over a time period. I was unable to persuade "Alpha" to understand my interest. Once again Wolfram seems to confuse "knowledge" with "mathematical computation". It's probably great for computing fractals, but I doubt it will be able to use Fractal math to visualize modal vibrations in a piece of structure. It's not even good in it's "Birthday" example. Completely missed the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on my birth date. Instead substituted the death of Geli Raubel as the day's significant event. Google does it better! John W. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul N. Lee" <Paul.N.Lee@Worldnet.att.net> To: <fractint@mailman.xmission.com>; <fractal-world@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Sunday, May 24, 2009 10:18 AM Subject: [Fractint] Wolfram Alpha Boots Up
Friday evening (May 15, 2009) was the debut of Stephen Wolfram's "Wolfram Alpha". It officially went public on Monday (May 18, 2009) from the web site at: http://www.wolframalpha.com/index.html
According to this article: http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Wolfram-Alpha-Boots-Up-45364022.html Wolfram Alpha employs HPC clusters for its computational hardware. And at launch time, the application had access to about 10,000 x86 CPUs spread across five data-centers.
Apparently there are still a few problems to work out, based upon what the article states, but it is interesting to see that queries for fractals can be generated with varying iterations specified.