Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat
When I was 18, back in 1999, I had an internship at WRI (Wolfram Research) in Illinois. I&#x27;d applied armed only with a library copy of the Mathematica book, so they sent me a CD with Mathematica on it. I made some demo things and got a slot, and flew to Champaign.<p>I worked on polyhedra for a summer, writing code that could unroll a polyhedral model to its 2D net. Find the volume, the number of faces and all kinds of stuff. I met a bunch of interesting people and it was a blast.<p>I also fell asleep at my keyboard more than once. It was a beautiful summer, biking to work and working with what I still think is one of, if not the, best language ever.<p>Here&#x27;s why all this is relevant - I came back to real life to study CompSci on these old Sparc machines. And it was like, here&#x27;s the power button. What&#x27;s an object in Java? What&#x27;s a compiler? All reasonable stuff.<p>But: Wolfram Research and Mathematica had, in a sense, ruined my undergraduate life before it started. Why were we using all these bizarre tools? Can&#x27;t we do this a million times faster? Why are we learning all these bizarre integrals?<p>It was similar to being denied graphing calculators in A-Level Mathematics (in the UK, think high school). I get it - we need to learn &#x27;the basics&#x27; and survive without tools to some degree. But, it would have been nice to use them in some contexts and not just deny their existence.<p>There&#x27;s an anecdote I think about Milton Friedman being shown people building a dam with shovels and not digging machines, to keep people employed in some God-forsaken country. He asked, why don&#x27;t you use spoons instead? Then, more people would be employed.<p>Mathematica and Alpha are wonderful tools, and I highly recommend applying for an internship if you&#x27;re of the right age or whatever the requirements are today.