WolframAlpha Won't Give Me the Time of Day

The computational knowledge project known as WolframAlpha was publicly released last week with much to-do in the blogoshpere. It's an interesting project -- we can't call it a search engine -- that is meant to computer and provide factual answers based on input and a lot of data. However, it wouldn't give me the time of day. Then again, I guess its intention is not to be like ask.com with all of that data.

Now when I say, "a lot of data," I mean a LOT of data. WolframAlpha computes it answers pulling from more than 10 trillion pieces of data and uses more than 50,000 algorithms and models. If you enter in a date, a mathematical question, etc., it will return many factual answers about that entry, one of which is probably what you were looking for.

For instance, by typing in "September 11, 2001," it returned the following data:

• Input interpretation: Tuesday, September 11, 2001

  Date formats: 09/11/2001

• Time difference from today (Thursday, May 21, 2009):
  7 years 8 months 10 days ago
  401 weeks 2 days ago
  2809 days ago
  7.69 years ago

• Time in 2001:
  254th day
  27th week

• Observances for September 11, 2001 (United States):
  (no official holidays or major observances)

• Notable events for September 11, 2001:
  World Trade Center destroyed
  Death of Barbara Olson (TV personality)
  Death of Mohammed Atta (terrorist)

• Daylight information for September 11, 2001 in New York, New York:
  sunrise 6:33 am EDT
  sunset 7:12 pm EDT
  duration of daylight 12 hours 39 minutes

• Phase of the Moon:
  third quarter moon

While all of the information above is (I'm assuming) accurate, one element to this is the human interpretation. WolframAlpha should in no way be mistaken for artificial intelligence. In fact, it's not intelligent at all. It is not using the acquired knowledge to apply it skillfully. For instance, any human posting the results of this search would have most certainly noted prominently September 11 as the day of the World Trade Center attacks AND the attack on the Pentagon AND the downing of Flight 93. A computer wouldn't realize its significance unless told by a human. And it is humans who are interfacing with it, so we're still a long way off until things like Wolfram Alpha seem really "smart." We'll have to check the Turing Test on that one.