Wolfram Alpha Blog

Falling with Helium - https://what-if.xkcd.com/62/

> While researching this article,[5] I managed to lock up my copy of Mathematica several times on balloon-related differential equations, and subsequently got my IP address banned from Wolfram|Alpha for making too many requests. The ban-appeal form asked me to explain what task I was performing that necessitated so many queries, so this is what I put: ...

---

https://www.facebook.com/OfficialWolframAlpha/posts/did-you-know-that-we-banned-xkcds-randall-munroes-ip-address-whoops-we-address-t/10151698564054751/

Did you know that we banned xkcd's Randall Munroe's IP address? Whoops! We address that mishap AND his query here:

---

A Response to “Falling with Helium” - https://blog.wolframalpha.com/2013/09/19/a-response-to-falling-with-helium-2/

> Recently the author of xkcd, Randall Munroe, was asked the question of how long it would be necessary for someone to fall in order to jump out of an airplane, fill a large balloon with helium while falling, and land safely. Randall unfortunately ran into some difficulties with completing his calculation, including getting his IP address banned by Wolfram|Alpha. (No worries: we received his request and have already fixed that.)

Lots of number crunching. There are very simple transfers they could do like the Hohmann transfer. Realistically, the mass of the comet is so small, and conservation of fuel is so important that they are probably doing a significantly more complicated transfer that utilizes the gravity of other orbital bodies to slingshot the lander. Some wikipedia pages you may find interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network

Ideally they would have an orbit that would have a really low intercept velocity, so the deceleration burns would require the least amount of fuel possible. Once they get close, they burn to get into a stable orbit around the comet. I found one article covering the math behind the deceleration orbit:

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2014/08/04/rosetta-first-mission-to-orbit-and-land-on-a-comet/

I'm glad to see other people working on this problem. We (Wolfram|Alpha) are doing this too, starting out with the making the 'easy cases' nearly automatic.

Here's a blog-post describing our effort: http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2012/02/09/launching-a-democratization-of-data-science/

You can also play around with our examples without having to sign up to Wolfram|Alpha Pro. My favorite is an automatic analysis of the Titanic data that nicely illustrates that while the motto "women and children first" applied, being rich certainly helped: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=+&examplefile=1&datasetfile=DataInput%2Fcategories-numbers-genders&examplefile=1&datasetfile=DataInput%2Fcategories-numbers-genders

We cover other kinds of simple analysis and visualization too, like heat maps, Venn diagrams, graphs, and so on. As always, feedback welcome.

> Takes about 5-20 seconds to load a page on my 1Gb fiber connection

Wolfram Alpha is implemented in Mathematica, which --- to understate the situation --- was never intended as a high performance backend server language. I suspect that's the reason for the bad performance.

"As a result, the five million lines of Mathematica code that make up Wolfram|Alpha are equivalent to many tens of millions of lines of code in a lower-level language like C, Java, or Python." [1]

Sure, there's something to be said for implementing logic in high-level code, but without a plan for lowering that high-level logic to machine code in a way that performs well, you're setting yourself up for long-term pain.

[1] https://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/01/the-secret-behind-the-computational-engine-in-wolframalpha/

It's not misleading at all --hinging on a literal reading of that quote is just disingenuous. For the record, further down that blog post[1], Wolfram writes (emphasis added):

"So what does it all mean? I think it's pretty important, because it really changes the whole process --and economics-- of programming. I've even seen it quite dramatically within our own company. As the Wolfram Language and the Wolfram Programming Cloud have been coming together, there've been more and more places where we've been able to use them internally. And each time, it's been amazing to see programming tasks that used to take weeks or months suddenly get done in days or less."

How is that not a very concrete claim about the product?

[1] http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2014/06/23/wolfram-programming-cloud-is-live/

Google and WolframAlpha are not direct business competitors today (as many have pointed out.) But there is overlap in direction:

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/

Our overarching goal, the “higher purpose” of this project, is to make all computable, factual knowledge available to everyone. http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/04/28/welcome-to-the-wolfram-alpha-blog/