Wolfram Alpha as a search engine is strong on mathematical operations, as expected, however it is very weak and I mean "very", with regard to information acquisition. This seams to be in terms of data location. I wanted to retrieve data on the phenomena below and perform some calculations on the data. Alpha Pro could not locate the data for the subject matter below but could be easily retrieved using Google and work then done using Mathematica making Alpha Pro (and therefore Alpha) of little use. Perhaps I am not sufficiently familiar with the query syntax.
The successful interface of the future will be similar to a combination of Wolfram Alpha and IBM's Watson. A natural language interface (voice and keyed for technical / symbolic entry), a large local knowledge base (terabytes cached for the individual) and reasoning sufficient to respond to queries that require responses such as Watson's "a meringue harangue". Reasoning in the sense of creating or verifying evidence and logic (deductive logic being a small subset of the knowledge of mathematics required).
At roughly the center of the Atlantic Ocean there is a "mid-ocean ridge" where magma pushes upward creating new ocean floor which spreads outward in both directions creating the North American Plate and the Eurasian Plate in the Northern hemisphere and the South American Plate and African Plate to the South. Viewed magnetically the ocean floor exhibits an alternating stripe pattern running parallel to the ridge. These alternating "stripes" are alternating in magnetic polarity caused by the apparently random reversal of the Earth's magnetic field. The period between reversals range from 10 million years to twice in 50,000 years. The period seems to be due to a chaotic process in the sense of a non-linear, dynamic system that is deterministic, despite the name "chaos", but is highly sensitive to differences or changes in conditions. The old, proverbial "Butterfly Effect". While there is no correlation between extinction events and reversals, reversals do correlate with periods of a weak magnetic field. The Sun reverses polarity every 9-12 years but that reversal correlates with periods of a strong magnetic field. A reversal may be rapid only in geologic time and a NASA simulation showed chaotic magnetic fields during the shift with Earth having multiple north and south poles. Terrestrial reversals may have a much greater effect on a civilization dependent on electro-magnetic systems.
