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Now that Wolfram Alpha is released, I am interested in finding out if it can be used as a time-saver in daily programming.

What would you use Wolfram Alpha to do, that earlier took you more time to do manually?

I guess the "Web and Computer systems"-examples is a good start, but there must be more hidden gems that will be really practical for us programmers.

A short list of examples:

Please only include one search query per answer, then we can rate them to get the best ones to the top.

(I made this one a community-wiki, since we will be using the voting for ranking)

Note: If some of the links in the answers don't work (eg: wolfram doesn't find any results, then replace all + with spaces..

Francisco Alvarado
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Espen Herseth Halvorsen
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  • Fixed it.. Looks like StackOverflow does something with the symbol "+" in links... – Espen Herseth Halvorsen May 17 '09 at 22:00
  • I know it's just an example, but md5 -s "whatever" from the command line is definitely faster than a web query. – Brian Gianforcaro May 17 '09 at 22:02
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    Some of us uses the address-field as a command-line ;) ( http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001265.html ).. Just add a search-shortcut for wolfram so that you can write "W QUERY" and search directly.. (of course, you should use something other than "w" since that one is great for wikipedia-search.. – Espen Herseth Halvorsen May 17 '09 at 22:06

5 Answers5

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I might 'save time' by not playing around with it and doing real work instead. :)

Brian
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Calculating lift coefficients of NACA profiles (example).

(I made a program for this, but it's nice to have the option to do it quick)

Matthew Murdoch
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Rook
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I probably won't use it for anything. I don't know about you, but I deal with enough black boxes on a daily basis, and I'd rather use the ones that have been tried and tested thoroughly.

gnovice
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This might come back to haunt me later, but it strikes me that although there might be a point to WA used in a mechanical manner, from my perspective I'm thinking it's not the hard calculable information questions which are the problem which needs to be solved, it's the soft human data which defies classification or rigid modelling. Google seem to understand this, not sure Stephen Wolfram does.

OTOH it could be that anyone can be Colin Laney now.

annakata
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Someone double check me here: The MD5 hash of "Wolfram Alpha" (no quotes) is: 882b 0be2 79eb 7e88 86cd 3dae 19c1 d267 And not: a615 9984 9aee b7be 3091 68bc 0ab7 ?

EDIT: The hash changes every time given the same query...what kind of hash is this? http://www14.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=MD5%22Wolfram+Alpha%22

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    Hash calculated on an original Pentium processor ? :-) – Rook May 18 '09 at 00:30
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    The md5 sum is indeed the former one: 882b0be279eb7e8886cd3dae19c1d267, with md5sum (GNU coreutils) 7.3. The Pentium Bug appears to be fixed by now :) –  Jun 05 '09 at 08:44