GBP in 1954, or: Why is Wolfram Alpha full of fail?
Asked by
andrew (
16543
)
July 30th, 2009
What a disappointment. I’ve been watching M for Murder with my dad and in one scene a main character reveals an attaché full of (gasp!) £500! My dad asked “I wonder how much that is worth today?”
Thinking this would finally be a problem wolfram alpha could solve, I’ve spent the last 20 minutes trying coerce the input into something it would understand, but nothing works. The closest I can get is the value of 1954 dollars today.
Can anyone figure out how to solve this with wolframalpha? Or, barring that, help me figure this out and further reinforce my opinion that wolframalpha is worse than useless?
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16 Answers
i’ve been of the opinion that it’s mostly useless for quite a while, so all i can say is: have you checked wikipedia?
Tsk, Andrew. Bashing the competition. Bad founder!
@augustlan In theory, it’d be amazing. But classic wolfram, you end up with big expectations and when it doesn’t work, it just stinks. This is why we keep expectations low here.
I just tried to solve it also. My conclusion: It’s shit.
Edit: OMG! Step 1 Step 2 I think. Maybe?
I got it to work for U.S. Dollars (worth $3937.87 today) , but not for British Pounds. Worthless.
@Andrew:no, i don’t know, it just seems like something that it might have a chart for. plus, a lot of times i thought i would be all fancy, and try to use wolfram-alpha, then it didn’t understand, and I eventually found it on wikipedia, which further intensified the fail-ness of WA, IMHO.
Here is the historical pound/dollar exchange rate (no thanks to Wolfram Alpha) from which you might be able to calculate the answer.
I think the problem is that the inflation tables for britain only go back to 1980 or so.
It’s saying average rate of inflation is 3.01% for UK. I’ll see about auggie’s link.
Ah ha! £500 1954 British Pounds are worth 15,154.90 current U.S. dollars. Here’s how I found out.
No help from Wolfram.
A ha! Ok.
The exchange rate was pegged at $2.80 in ‘49, so £500 in 1954 is worth $1400, which today is worth $11026.04
WA chokes on doing the math, btw. Dear Wolfram: you suck.
Mine was close. I still thinks WA stinks.
The interesting question is which is more accurate:
500 GBP (1954) -> GBP today -> $
or
500 GBP (1954) -> $ (1954) -> $ today
Geesh. I don’t think WA ever really intended to answer questions that nothing else could. It’s intended to answer all sorts of questions that you would normally have to go to a bunch of different sites for. It’s still young and rather limited, give it some time.
Take the equivalent value a GBP has with today’s dollar. Take your 1954 dollar value. Convert to
GBP.
Wolfram Alpha can only give you an answer if it was recorded at some point. Like andrew said, there probably weren’t records back then and I don’t think the developers want to put estimated values, they want legit information listed.
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