The answer is 42

[Chris Lloyd]

Last week the eccentric genius Stephen Wolfram released his new intelligent search engine WolframAlpha. The idea is to provide a search engine that takes questions in ordinary language. The ever humble Wolfram reports to the world

I’m happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work…

I was, however, rather underwhelmed by some aspects of the Statistics and Data Analysis interface. Have a look at the regression example. Would anybody in their right mind do a regression through this tool? It seems to me that the existence of such a tool trivialises data analysis and invites thoughtless statistical summaries. On the other hand, the statistical distribution section looks pretty helpful, especilaly for students,* and might even save me from having to move my carcass out of my seat and hauling down Johnson and Kotz.

The developers do have a sense of humour. When the system cannot answer your question (or when it is overloaded) it replies

I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

and if you type in the question “life the universe and everything….”



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