Query: why would we use wolfram alpha, when (for example) the University of Washington has a site license for mathematica? It would be more efficient, and take less work to write mathematica scripts to double-check our work, and ask William (or another UW person) to run the tests on a UW machine?
On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 6:40 PM, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > I'm sure you are aware of the Sage open-source mathematics software > > http://www.sagemath.org/ > > which has a mission of creating a viable free open source alternative > to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and MATLAB. > > Obviously Sage has a test suite where results from Sage are compared > to a set of known results. For example, one test for the factorial() > function is: > > sage: factorial(10) > 3628800 > > As you are no doubt aware, all non-trivial software contains bugs. It > would be very useful to compare the result from Sage to that of other > software which is developed independently. > > One way, which could be used in some circumstances, is to compare the > Sage result to that obtained from Wolfram Alpha. For example > > http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10! > > shows 10 factorial is 3628800, so there is a very high probability > that WolframAlpha and Sage are both correct. > > It would sometimes be useful to add a comment to the Sage test suite > that the result has been compared to that obtained by WolframAlpha. So > we could write something like: > > --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > WolframAlpha gives the same result as Sage - see: > http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10! > > sage: factorial(10) > 3628800 > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Sage has tens of thousands of tests and that number is increasing all > the time. Only a fairly small fractions of those tests could be > computed with WolframAlpha, and even in cases where they could, we > might not chose to do so. > > Looking at the terms of use of WolframAlpha, > > http://www.wolframalpha.com/termsofuse.html > > I personally can't see anything that would suggest that comparing > results with Wolfram Alpha, and documenting this would breach the > terms of use. But when I suggested we could verify a result in > WolframAlpha > > http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=N[Integrate[+Sin[x]%2Fx^2%2C{x%2C1%2CPi%2F2}]%2C50] > > one Sage developer questioned whether this would be within the terms > of use. See:his comments at: > > http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/msg/1f8af294fbf40ccc?hl=en&; > > One section in particular of your terms of use says:: > > "You are not allowed to use Wolfram|Alpha to create something that is > likely or intended to be reused as a data source for further > processing, or that in some other way serves as a replacement or > alternative to using Wolfram|Alpha itself. This applies whether what > you create is in electronic or print form." > > Sage, has a web based interface that allows one to perform advanced > mathematical calculations. Clearly there are some calculations that > could be performed in WolframAlpha, but which could also be performed > in Sage. If you try Sage - you can get a free account at > > http://t2nb.math.washington.edu:8080/ > > you will soon realise that Sage is quite different to WolframAlpha. > Sage is certainly not intended to be a replacement for WolframAlpha - > in fact, Sage existed several years before WolframAlpha. > > Sage has its own language, which is based on Python. Sage can only > process input using that syntax. It does not attempt to process > questions the way WolframAlpha does. > > To save any further discussions on the Sage developers list about > whether the use of WolframAlpha in the way I explained would be > permissible, could you please clarify the matter. > > Obviously using WolframAlpha to compare results with Sage would be of > benefit to the Sage project. But it would also benefit Wolfram > Research too. In the event that comparisons with WolframAlpha showed > different results, and we concluded WolframAlpha had a bug, we would > out of politeness let you know. In fact, only recently I made your > technical support team aware of a documentation error in PrimePi[] and > PrimeQ[], which I understand will be fixed. This documentation error > was discovered when some comparisons were made between Sage and > Mathematica. > > Dr. David Kirkby (a developer of the Sage mathematics software). > > -- > To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to > sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel > URL: http://www.sagemath.org > -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
