<story><title>SymPy Gamma: an open-source, Python-based alternative to Wolfram Alpha</title><url>http://www.sympygamma.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>asmeurer</author><text>(I am the lead developer of SymPy)&lt;p&gt;The important thing to note about SymPy Gamma is that it does &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; the mathematics part of WolframAlpha. It&amp;#x27;s also relatively new. There is no natural language input. There are no non-mathematical capabilities. The syntax should match Python syntax for the most part, though there are extensions to allow things like &amp;quot;sin x&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;x^2&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;2 x&amp;quot;. All this will hopefully improve in the future (and pull requests are welcome!).&lt;p&gt;Most of the code was written by David Li (who is actually a high school student). You can watch a presentation about it here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://conference.scipy.org/scipy2013/presentation_detail.php?id=183&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;conference.scipy.org&amp;#x2F;scipy2013&amp;#x2F;presentation_detail.ph...&lt;/a&gt;. It started out as a &amp;quot;because we can&amp;quot; toy, and it&amp;#x27;s gotten much better.&lt;p&gt;The real benefit of SymPy Gamma over WolframAlpha is that there are no barriers around it, since it&amp;#x27;s entirely (BSD) open source. For example, if you start computing something interesting and want to try more, you can move to SymPy Live (&lt;a href=&quot;http://live.sympy.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;live.sympy.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) and compute in a more session like environment. Or you can use SymPy locally on your own computer.&lt;p&gt;Regarding the comments that wolfram is mostly used for play, I&amp;#x27;m not so sure about it. Wolfram is invaluable to students as a calculator. Sure Google can compute 100 * pi, but it falls apart when you try to compute integrate(sin(x) * x, x). When I was in college (which was last year), I saw people use it all the time. It&amp;#x27;s been very successful in making computer algebra accessible to virtually everyone.&lt;p&gt;By the way, probably the best feature of SymPy Gamma right now is the integration steps. See for instance the &amp;quot;integral steps&amp;quot; section of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sympygamma.com/input/?i=integrate%28sin%28x%29*x%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.sympygamma.com&amp;#x2F;input&amp;#x2F;?i=integrate%28sin%28x%29*x%...&lt;/a&gt;. This is a feature that used to be free at WolframAlpha, and it&amp;#x27;s extremely useful if you are learning integration in calculus. It doesn&amp;#x27;t work for all integrals, because not all integrals are computed the way you would by hand.</text></comment>
<story><title>SymPy Gamma: an open-source, Python-based alternative to Wolfram Alpha</title><url>http://www.sympygamma.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>primitivesuave</author><text>I used to work at Wolfram Research on Wolfram Alpha&amp;#x27;s backend, and one of the most challenging technical problems we faced was free-form input. Although W|A has by no means perfected this, this is hardly an alternative - queries like &amp;quot;factor the number 100&amp;quot; fail because there is only the beginnings of a free-form transformer. Obviously, the usefulness of being able to answer &amp;quot;factor one hundred&amp;quot; is questionable, but W|A solved it out of Stephen Wolfram&amp;#x27;s aspiration to be able to &amp;quot;compute everything&amp;quot;. Right now, this is just a programming language you can run on the web.&lt;p&gt;The other thing is that W|A has trillions of data points and what I am only allowed to describe as the beginnings of a semantic network for inferring relations between them. It was a vastly overcomplicated system that was difficult to work with, so I am quite confident that some day there will be an open-source alternative that anyone can contribute to.&lt;p&gt;The other thing to take into account is how this affects the future. Wolfram Research thought they were going to &amp;quot;disrupt the calculator&amp;quot; (I heard this ridiculous statement once at a meeting). In reality, Wolfram Alpha queries are more often for the sake of fun than for the sake of discovery (I know this because there was a big TV in the break room that would keep displaying things that people searched on Wolfram Alpha). Is it really that useful to be able to have a computer give you an answer to &amp;quot;I have two apples, Jill has three apples. How many apples do we both have?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=I+have+two+apples%2C+Jill+has+three+apples.+How+many+apples+do+we+both+have%3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wolframalpha.com&amp;#x2F;input&amp;#x2F;?i=I+have+two+apples%2C+Ji...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or is it more useful to make something that can take in symptoms of your current ailment and tell you which disease you are most likely to have? Wolfram Alpha does this as well.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=I+have+a+fever+and+a+runny+nose&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wolframalpha.com&amp;#x2F;input&amp;#x2F;?i=I+have+a+fever+and+a+ru...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Although the results are difficult to interpret. In my time at Wolfram Research, I was certainly convinced by the idea of knowledge engines and their ultimate emergence, but I think the way this will be accomplished is in more in a Google-esque fashion where their knowledge engine results are displayed alongside a real search algorithm. Best of luck to the people on this project, I hope you make the first step into creating an open source knowledge engine.</text></comment>