There’s new data flowing into Wolfram|Alpha every second. And we’re always working very hard to develop the core code and data for the system. In fact, internally, we have a complete new version of the system that’s built every day. But before we release this version for general use, we do extensive validation and testing.

In addition to real-time data updates, we’ve made a few changes to Wolfram|Alpha since its launch three weeks ago. But today, as one step in our ongoing, long-term development process, we’ve just made live the first broad updates to the core code and data of Wolfram|Alpha.

And now we’re working hard to get ready the next update… which will be in fact probably be going live for preview testing as early as tomorrow.

We’ll be doing many similar updates in the future; check this blog for the latest information.

Today’s update includes the following:

Additional linguistic forms for many types of data and questions

More comparisons of composite properties (e.g. “US military vs. UK”)

Combined time series plots of different quantities (e.g. “germany gdp vs population”)

More complete handling of government positions (e.g. “chancellor”, etc.)

Updates to country borders for India, China, Slovenia, Croatia, and others

Updates to naming for certain politically sensitive countries and regions

Additional subcountry regions (e.g. “Wales”); many more to come

Additional support for current and past fractional timezones (e.g. “Iran time”)

City-by-city handling of U.S. states with multiple timezones

Updates to certain European currencies (e.g. for “Cyprus” and “Slovakia”)

Some additional historical events; many more to come

Additional probability computations for cards and coins (e.g. “2 or 3 aces”)

Additional output for partitions of integers (e.g. “partitions of 47”)

Implicit handling of geometric figure properties (e.g. “ellipse with area 6 and major axis 2”)

Additional support for Mathematica 3D graphics syntax

Additional support for stock prices with explicit dates

Support for planet-to-planet distances and “nearest planet”, etc.

Extra information when comparing incompatible units (e.g. “ergs vs. newtons”)

Improved linguistic handling for many foods (e.g. “love apple”)

More mountains added, especially in Australia

Support for many less-common given names (e.g. “zebulon”)

More “self-aware” questions answered (e.g. “how old are you”)

More consistent handling of sidebar links to Wikipedia, etc.

Altogether, there have been 1850 code commits, and 591 code files have been changed. About 1.1 million data values have also been touched in some way in this update.