Last May I wrote a blog post entitled “9½ things Wolfram Alpha doesn’t know”. It was meant primarily as a bit of fun, but I had a serious point. A few months earlier, Wolfram Alpha had been announced amid a tremendous buzz of excitement and expectation. With its new computational approach, it had seemed it might even usurp Google as the default gateway to online knowledge.

But when the service went live, it became apparent that Wolfram Alpha was a specialist tool for scientists. Though ingenious, it was all but useless if you just wanted everyday information about everyday topics.

Now, nine months later, the fuss has died down and Wolfram Alpha has settled into its scientific niche. It hasn’t acquired a database of Eurovision winners or CPU die sizes, and that’s fair enough. But while tinkering with it myself recently I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some of the things that Wolfram Alpha does turn out to know. To be fair, I’ve seen occasional reports of Wolfram Alpha “Easter eggs” in the past; but the examples below are all responses I’ve recently found through my own experimentation. And I’m certain there are many more gems just waiting to be discovered…

1. Who shot J.R.?

A straightforward question, and Wolfram Alpha gives a concise and informative answer. I admit I’m a little too young to really know who J.R. is, except that I have an idea he used to go about in a big hat. But at least I now know who shot him.

2. Who shot Mr Burns?

This one’s more meaningful to my generation, and again Wolfram is bang on the money. I like the way you can sort of see the engine’s working too, as it translates my question into a subject identifier. Oh, spoilers, by the way, if you’ve been in an isolation tank for a decade and a half.

3. Who wrote Jude the Obscure?

Now we just have to work out why.

4. What’s the real name of Ice-T?

I’m no psychologist, but do you think this might explain anything? If you ask for general information about Mr Marrow, Wolfram Alpha also reveals that the Original Gangster was born in New Jersey in 1958. And that’s word.

5. Why do birds suddenly appear?

I have to admit, I really didn’t expect this one to work; but Wolfram Alpha came up with the goods, and even neatly sidestepped the common pitfall of attributing the song wholly to the Carpenters.

6. Who let the dogs out?

The input interpretation suggests that this is a generic response, but if you ask who let the frogs out, or who let the air out of your tyres, you just get the old “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure” error. Oddly, Wolfram Alpha doesn’t seem to know about the contemporaneous, and slightly less dreadful, song “It Wasn’t Me”.

7. Are you talking to me?

Fun fact: apparently, the line “you talkin’ to me?” wasn’t in the script to Taxi Driver, and was improvised by Robert De Niro. Wolfram Alpha doesn’t know that, but then neither did I (I learnt it from Wikipedia).

8. Who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks?

Outwardly, Wolfram Alpha presents itself as a scholarly computation engine, but deep down you know it got soul. RIP, Isaac.

9. Is the cake a lie?

Strictly speaking, it’s the graffiti that say the cake is a lie, which is later disproved; but since it’s a fairly confusing game we can forgive a small mix-up like this. Of course, with Portal 2 on the way who knows what further revelations await?

10. Does he look like a bitch?

Top marks to Wolfram Alpha for not stumbling on the vague reference to “he” and picking up the pop culture reference. It’s surprisingly coy about the b-word, though, especially since elsewhere it’ll happily define the word for you and even offer details of the feminist magazine of the same name.

11. What is love?

By this stage I was actually starting to get a bit creeped out by Wolfram Alpha’s apparent mind-reading ability. For my last try I thought I’d tax it with a real poser:

12. What kind of bear is best?

Game, set and match to Wolfram Alpha. Can you find any other surprising or amusing nuggets of information buried away in Wolfram Alpha’s knowledge banks? If so, please post them below!