Saturday, October 24, 2009

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...

7 comments:

jacob said...

lol great find! http://wolfa.com/input/?i=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 i had to try it and same thing! i guess dividing by "infinity" takes too long and is incomputable... poor little wolf, you messed with its brain

tomas said...

Jaja, i´ve tried it too!!!! we are evil!!! go tell google!!!! hahaha

Unknown said...

You may be wondering, "why doesn't it just detect that it won't be able to finish the problem and tell you that?"

That, my friend, is the Halting Problem.

Dan said...

That should be fascinatingly easy for a computer to solve.

Multiple fractions should always be reduced out in pairs to a multiply before they are resolved.

What fail.

Anonymous said...

Someone posted this to reddit. then the link 404'd

does wolfram alpha had a partnership with conde naste?

Anonymous said...

Don't use wolfa.com as the domain name. It is fake and not registered to WolframAlpha.com. There is a good change it will be redirected to some malware server at some point in the future.

Kathryn Cramer said...

wolfa.com isn't wolframalpha.com. It's an illegal mirror site.