Monday, June 08, 2009

Wolfram|Alpha Fail

I was playing with the sequence continuation feature in Wolfram|Alpha because of its similarity to my pattern recognition tool. Surprisingly, one of the sequences I entered consistently causes Wolfram|Alpha to throw an error message:

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that..."
Wolfram|Alpha has temporarily exceeded its current maximum load. Please try again soon.

The sequence which causes this is 0,1,1,0,1,...

Other variations of the sequence do not throw an error:

0,1,1,0,1,1,...
1,1,0,1,1,...
1,0,1,1,0,1,...

I tried doing some Googling to see if any other queries have been found which consistently throw an error, but didn't find any. It would be neat if I am the first one to find such a query. I wonder if every time I submit that query I am actually crashing one of their servers...

1 comment:

Byron Knoll said...

Update: it seems like any sequence of length five and zero in the first and fourth position crashes it... division by zero error?