Wolfram Alpha Gets First Update

Wolfram Update has just announced its first major update.  Unlike Google, Wolfram Alpha will actually announce its updates and provide a detailed list of the changes.

It’s a refreshing bit of transparency for sure, although no SEOs are trying to get a number one ranking on Wolfram Alpha right now either.

Here is the full list of changes included in the new Wolfram Alpha update:

* Additional linguistic forms for many types of data and questions
* More comparisons of composite properties (e.g. “US military vs. UK”)
* Combined time series plots of different quantities (e.g. “germany gdp vs population”)
* More complete handling of government positions (e.g. “chancellor”, etc.)
* Updates to country borders for India, China, Slovenia, Croatia, and others
* Updates to naming for certain politically sensitive countries and regions
* Additional subcountry regions (e.g. “Wales”); many more to come
* Additional support for current and past fractional timezones (e.g. “Iran time”)
* City-by-city handling of U.S. states with multiple timezones
* Updates to certain European currencies (e.g. for “Cyprus” and “Slovakia”)
* Some additional historical events; many more to come
* Additional probability computations for cards and coins (e.g. “2 or 3 aces”)
* Additional output for partitions of integers (e.g. “partitions of 47″)
* Implicit handling of geometric figure properties (e.g. “ellipse with area 6 and major axis 2″)
* Additional support for Mathematica 3D graphics syntax
* Additional support for stock prices with explicit dates
* Support for planet-to-planet distances and “nearest planet”, etc.
* Extra information when comparing incompatible units (e.g. “ergs vs. newtons”)
* Improved linguistic handling for many foods (e.g. “love apple”)
* More mountains added, especially in Australia
* Support for many less-common given names (e.g. “zebulon”)
* More “self-aware” questions answered (e.g. “how old are you”)
* More consistent handling of sidebar links to Wikipedia, etc.

So Wolfram Alpha now answers more “self-aware” questions, which should make things interesting.

Its next update will be called “Skynet” (just kidding).

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