Here are some example code-golf submissions using Wolfram|Alpha:
Valentine's golf! I heart you!Valentine's golf! I heart you!
Largest number in ten bytes of codeLargest number in ten bytes of code
I have two main questions about the use of Wolfram|Alpha:
- Is the use of the Internet problematic?
- What is considered the output?
The Internet connectivity concern gets brought up alot on these answers and the argument is usually raised that since there are Raspberry Pis which run the Wolfram Language without an Internet connection, they are fine. The problem is that the WL is not the same thing as Wolfram|Alpha (indeed, most Mathematica answers on this site would be more accurately called WL solutions since Mathematica is just one program which runs the WL). I can't find any evidence that these Raspberry Pis can actually evaluate W|A queries such as ack(9!,9!)
or heartcurve1
(which are meaningless in the WL) without an Internet connection. Even if they did, it would have to be a limited in scope compared to the W|A site and I doubt people are testing their code on Raspberry Pis to ensure that their query will work.
I think it's also unclear what the output of an expression typed into W|A should be. The results page for any W|A query consists of several pods and subpods, such as Input interpretation
, Plot
, Equations
, Properties
, Input
, Result
, Alternate forms
, etc. For the heart curve example, I think we are expected to interpret the content in Plot
as the output, whereas for the Ackermann function example, we go with the Knuth up-arrow
subpod in Alternate forms
(note that we can't even say that the rule is to use the first pod after the input interpretation pod since in this case the output would be (too large to represent)
). How is this valid, but just outputting all possible strings of length 13 isn't considered a valid answer if the challenge is to output Hello, world!
?
Note that this isn't covered by this question about the use of W|A's datasets since we're not just getting data using Mathematica built-ins, but using Wolfram|Alpha to parse the "code" and functions (such as the Ackermann function) which only exist in W|A.