Wolfram Alpha on Sarah Palin

Almost a year ago, I managed to confound Wolfram Alpha with a long series of consecutive divide by zero calculations.

This time, in a process known colloquially as dicking around I found a way to confound Wolfram Alpha with a secret weapon. Sarah Palin.

"Computation timed out."

The input consists of an HTML hyperlink extracted from Amazon.com's product page for Sarah Palin's semenal work. I'm certain Wolfram Alpha wasn't intended to handle such input, but it's interesting nevertheless to see how it reacts when you throw something so absurd at it.

Wolfram Alpha also cheekily notes that the ISBN of "Going Rogue" is "an odd number." Indeed!

Wolfram Alpha - Divide By Too Many Zeros?

I seem to have inadvertently discovered a way to make Wolfram Alpha unavailable to me, at least for a little while.

At first I input a typical divide by zero, 1/0, it returned quickly enough with the expected response.


Then through the miracle of copy-and-paste I input the following into the search box:

1/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0


In response, I eventually got this back:

"This Wolfram|Alpha Server is temporarily unavailable."

I guess as far as Wolfram Alpha goes, if you can't dazzle it with brilliance...