As it kept coming up empty, Wolfram Alpha came to seem less like HAL 9000 and more like a chatbot. It’s been trained to respond to some kinds of queries, but any variations leave it stammering. It’s an idiot savant, smart about a few things but profoundly ignorant about large swaths of human knowledge.
via Wolfram Alpha, yet another pretender to Google’s throne. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine.