You may have heard of WolframAlpha, you may have not. If you have, you might still be surprised to learn that it isn’t a search engine. Instead, it’s a “computational knowledge engine”. What does this mean? It means that instead of scouring the web and indexing a repository of sites, it uses a collection of highly curated and structured data hosted in WolframAlpha’s “internal knowledgebase” to respond to queries. In combination with an ability to interpret what you say, it can give very precise answers. For instance, it can calculate the current distance from the earth to the moon, or the sun to the earth. (Both can vary substantially from the average, as they’re both elliptical orbits.) Or it can compare the cost of living indexes across two different places, or calculate the conditions of the universe some given amount of time after the Big Bang. Or you could even, for instance, ask for it to compare the nutritional value of 1 m&M and 1 slice of Swiss cheese.
Additionally, something really nice about WolframAlpha is that all the data that it uses is readily available for anyone to use (with a convenient download button under any output), and is streamlined to be as easy as possible to get and use in a computational setting. This is another thing that sets it apart from things like ChatGPT, which is more of a black box in terms of whatever it is that went into what it produces. (Relatedly, though, ChatGPT has a WolframAlpha plugin it can use to generate responses)
And this barely scratches the surface! WolframAlpha has a wide range of categories it has capabilities in:
And while WolframAlpha is —on paper— extremely versatile, it’s most commonly used for mathematics. This is in part due to Mathematica (a very powerful piece of software also developed by Wolfram), which is used here at Whitman in places like the introductory (and more advanced) physics courses. Additionally though, assuming you have the pro version WolframAlpha can show you a detailed step-by-step of how it arrived at a given solution, allowing you to (hopefully) check your work or better understand how something works.
All in all, it might be worth giving a look at. Even if you don't think you'll be using it much in your day to day, it's still an exemplary bit of technology that's quite novel to interact with.
Fun fact: the CIA has a world factbook (which WolframAlpha uses for some of its information)! https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/