Sqrt(xx+yy)+3cos(sqrt(xx+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20

https://www.google.com/search?btnG=1&pws=0&q=sqrt(x*x%2By*y)%2B3*cos(sqrt(x*x%2By*y))%2B5

by ing33k • 14 years ago

692 135 14 years ago

This works great in Firefox 11. It doesn't work in Chrome 18 which has WebGL disabled (on Linux).

EDIT: I really doesn't work because "NVIDIA cards with nouveau drivers in Linux are crash-prone." Firefox has no trouble, strangely.

cleaver• 14 years ago

OSX 10.7 and Chrome 18 is OK.

valinor4• 14 years ago

I have Chromium 17 on Ubuntu (WebGl desactivated) and it works.

wolf550e2• 14 years ago

You can enable it in about:flags

drivebyacct28• 14 years ago

Actually the thing in about:flags to to "enable" the "disabling" of WebGl.

huhtenberg2• 14 years ago

> 3D charts require a web browser and system that support WebGL.

Courtesy of Firefox 11.

(edit) Apparently webgl.force-enabled needs to be set to true in about:config, and then it works.

unreal37• 14 years ago

Thanks for this tip.

It wasn't working in Firefox 6, but then flipping the flag fixed it.

drivebyacct28• 14 years ago

>It doesn't work in Chrome 18 which has WebGL disabled (on Linux).

WebGL is definitely not disabled. You either disabled it or your GPU is not on the whitelist (or is on the blacklist).

postfuturist3• 14 years ago

According to chrome://gpu:

>WebGL: Unavailable. Hardware acceleration unavailable

Chrome sadness.

naner• 14 years ago

This works great in Firefox 11. It doesn't work in Chrome 18 which has WebGL disabled (on Linux).

I am also using Firefox on Linux and was actually suprised this worked. I assumed WebGL was still disabled by default for us.

nkassis2• 14 years ago

Nope it's been on for a while but it will only work if you have good OpenGL drivers. (About ~50% of Linux users who try are able to view WebGL content from mozilla's numbers).

Foy• 14 years ago

Not working in Opera 11.62

Shame that my favourite browser doesn't support WebGL. :( But props to Google for making their search engine that much cooler.

joliveira• 14 years ago

If you want to see it with Opera try the 12 alpha. Just did and it is working perfectly.

reedlaw• 14 years ago

It works for me in Chrome 18 under Ubuntu 12.04.

why-el• 14 years ago

Ubuntu 11.10 and Firefox 11. Works like a charm.

yaix• 14 years ago

Same here. Chrome doesn't.

However, since it's on an eeePC netbook the animations way to slow to be useful.

lloeki• 14 years ago

Works fine in Safari too. Don't forget to Enable WebGL in the Develop menu (itself activated in the Advanced tab of Safari's Preferences)

postfuturist3• 14 years ago

After fiddling with about:flags and using --ignore-gpu-blacklist on the command line, I got chrome://gpu to report that WebGL is fully enabled. It _still_ doesn't work, with this error reported in the console:

    [75:75:1827873622829:ERROR:command_buffer_proxy.cc(110)] Could not send GpuCommandBufferMsg_Initialize.

wolf550e2• 14 years ago

I suppose you need the latest mesa and drm. It works great here, but I'm running code from git.

Florin_Andrei3• 14 years ago

> It doesn't work in Chrome 18 which has WebGL disabled (on Linux).

Chrome 18 on Ubuntu 11.04 with real crappy Intel Mobile 4 Chipset and it works.

luser001• 14 years ago

Am I missing something? What's the significance of this link?

ordinary• 14 years ago

It's pretty. That's all, I think.

zobzu• 14 years ago

showing off google's webgl rendering of equations in search its neat

sylvinus• 14 years ago

With latest Chrome, you get a nice 3d viz of the result.

justincormack2• 14 years ago

Not on Android Chrome alas.

ars• 14 years ago

Screenshot: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/593/googlegraph.png/

On the website it rotates automatically and you can also control it manually, it's not static like in the screenshot.

georgieporgie• 14 years ago

I spent a good minute reformatting the formula in my head, trying to figure out the significance of the equation, before I went, "oh, duh, it's the fact that it's rendering a formula in 3D within a Google result!"

necenzurat• 14 years ago

is that a sombrero?

starwed• 14 years ago

Nah, you must be thinking of this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_hat_potential#A_pedagog...

guygurari• 14 years ago

No, but this is.

http://www.google.co.il/search?q=5000-140*%28x*x%2By*y%29%2B...

cynwoody• 14 years ago

I think you get Post of Thread!

utexaspunk• 14 years ago

It's more like a Devo hat...

MyNewAccount2• 14 years ago

very cool.

what i made for the lulz: https://www.google.com/search?btnG=1&pws=0&q=sqrt(x*...

tensafefrogs• 14 years ago

Haha I was about to post the same thing.

sqrt(xx+yyy)+3cos(sqrt(xx+yy))+5

nsns2• 14 years ago

Or even - https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&pws=0&#....

sceaj• 14 years ago

One of the differentiating factors of Wolfram|Alpha: Gone.

Google's doesn't require a 250mb plugin to become interactive (just a webgl capable browser...). And it seems to be about 8 times faster than W|A...

W|A still does a lot of things other sites don't do, but it tends to be unusably slow, and inconsistent (running same query twice in a row will sometimes not give all of the same results).

I figure the end is probably closer than one might expect for W|A. They don't seem to be moving quick enough to stay infront of the curve forever. Also, the site is becoming littered with obtrusive ads, and that's a pretty negative experience. (I also hear Wolfram's company may be struggling.)

This should have been praise for Google's new tool, but it turned into a rant on Wolfram|Alpha... whoops.

smackfu2• 14 years ago

Of course, since this is a Google result, it can just fail and say "3D charts require a web browser and system that support WebGL." Which is super useful to me.

drivebyacct28• 14 years ago

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic about it being super useful. If you are, it seems easier still to download Chrome to do a 3d render then it is to buy WA pro and download an apparently enormous plugin to do the same render

hereonbusiness• 14 years ago

I get the same using Chrome. It seems that there is no support for ATI/AMD cards on Linux: https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...

Firefox (11) has no such issues and renders just fine for me.

zanny• 14 years ago

Competition is good for both parties. Wolfram Alpha challenged Google to rethink what people search for to some degree, and Google's rigored performance should challenge Wolfram Alpha to become more performance aware and prevent them from taking too many features "premium".

And in the end, it is a win / win for users. I am always happy when the insanely smart people at Google have hard things to implement like this than how to integrate the posts of my friends on Google+ into my search results for a unicode table.

rbarooah• 14 years ago

It's only a win-win if it doesn't do too much damage to wolfram alpha, although I guess if Google pushes too hard it will drive Wolfram to try to integrate more and more into Apple's ecosystem.

fferen• 14 years ago

Wolfram Alpha also seems to bail out when a mathematical expression exceeds a certain complexity, which makes it fairly useless for the only thing I want to use it for - evaluating hairy integrals and other long expressions. Or worse, it just "interprets" it as a part of my original expression and calculates that, as if I just typed out the rest of it because I enjoy typing random symbols. It seems like such a waste to fire up Mathematica every time but I haven't found any comparable online tools.

I think W|A could have been a great tool for this kind of thing but instead it tried to cover every subject instead of doing one thing well.

troyastorino• 14 years ago

If you just type in the expression as Mathematica code, doesn't Wolfram Alpha evaluate it just as Mathematica would?

Karunamon• 14 years ago

The nail in the coffin for me on W|A was requiring a login in order to copy plain text results. (Even though the same data is copyable in the DOM, they actually go out of their way to obscure it!)

I don't think people understand how noxious this registration-obession is, especially when you need utilize it to access basic functionality.

I don't really go to W|A anymore unless there's something specifically math or statistics related that I'm looking for. That action killed any kind of casual use for me.

driverdan• 14 years ago

Very cool. Worked for all equations I tried with x and/or y but not z. Also doesn't work with greek letters. Worked with f(x) but not ƒ(x) or f(x,y).

Edit: Here's the official announcement http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/graphing-on-googlec...

darien2• 14 years ago

If anyone is interested about WebGL and the latest news surrounding it, I run a blog at http://www.webgl.com If you think it sucks, let me know.

huhtenberg2• 14 years ago

This looks... erm ... neat. A "sophomore OpenGL term project" kind of neat. Wolfram on the other hand does the graphs right [0], which hardly surprising given their 20 years of head start.

On a more general note, this reminds me of old Microsoft's tactics. Google should really stick to the search, but instead they throw together something that mimics competitor's feature. Something that looks more featureful and which is free, but upon closer inspection is effectively a half-ass effort, because it's an entirely different domain that's not their specialty.

[0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sqrt%28x*x%2By*y%29%2B3...

Florin_Andrei3• 14 years ago

I dunno. It's pretty, and it's good enough if you just want to gauge the overall shape of the curve, which is all I need most of the time.

zorked• 14 years ago

My bet is that this is supported by Google as a "here's a neat hack" feature, not as a "this is a vital feature in our ongoing to-the-death competition with Wolfram Alpha".

drivebyacct28• 14 years ago

[0] looks identical over the same ranges of x,y,z. http://goo.gl/pTrLh

Who cares if it's trivial? It's functional, fast, convenient and doesn't require a bunch of cruft. Kinda damages your quasi-rant to find out that you simply... didn't compare the graphs over the same interval. I don't know why every small feature that Google adds is either apparently out of fear of someone who's hardly a competitor or is proof that Google is the next Microsoft (which is a useless statement anyway).

This all just reminds me how truly sad HN's markup is. I can't even escape the multiplication in the query for Google to get it to render properly (I replaced it with a Goo.gl link).

WiseWeasel• 14 years ago

I think you can escape the asterisk by indenting the line with two spaces:

  text with * signs that doesn't get italicized *

the_cat_kittles• 14 years ago

Well, if i want a quick inspection this wins because i can rotate it without having to download other stuff.

muyuu• 14 years ago

What's so wrong about this representation? looks fine to me.

notatoad• 14 years ago

"google should focus on search"

i keep hearing this. what makes you think they aren't? Google has a huge staff and equally huge revenues, i'm sure that if they thought search quality could be improved by throwing more engineers at it, that's what they would do.

as long as they employ a lot of engineers, why not have some them working on cool things like this? i see this more as a demonstration of webgl and non-flash tech than an attack on W|A

Florin_Andrei3• 14 years ago

Yes. The definition of "search" seems to be changing.

razorstorm• 14 years ago

Exactly, just because google is adding a bunch of cool free non obtrusive features doesn't mean that they are stifling innovation in their main field. Google is a large company with countless divisions, it isn't just one engineer who can only work on one project at a time or anything.

mvgoogler• 14 years ago

So if a user enters the following search query: Sqrt(xx+yy)+3cos(sqrt(xx+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20

And gets a graph of the equation as the top result, are you claiming that this is a poor search experience? Are you claiming that this is a bad result?

If not, how is this feature not an improvement to search? How is this not "sticking to search"?

Note - I was not involved in any way with this feature, or with search quality in general

mwsherman• 14 years ago

Interestingly, in Chrome 18, it puts about 2% load on my CPU, and 80% load on my GPU.

oscardelben• 14 years ago

It's webgl so it uses your graphic processor.

alexk7• 14 years ago

Hmm. No perspective.

nikcub• 14 years ago

any query that still only has a single answer I will still use wolfram (I use them all via the DDG bangs)

nsns2• 14 years ago

Beautiful.

Elasborations - https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&pws=0&#....

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&pws=0&#....

mjcohenw• 14 years ago

Nice. Also interesting is this: "About 274,000 results (0.15 seconds)".

tuananh• 14 years ago

Google is becoming more like Wolfram. Semantic search engine all the way to go.

nextstep• 14 years ago

Aw. Whatever this query does, it doesn't do it in Mobile Safari :(

Eduard• 14 years ago

si(x^2exp(xy*sinh(y^3+x^2))) doesn't work

janardanyri• 14 years ago

Word of caution: I left this open in a Safari tab without thinking about it, and soon found that my Mac's UI was hanging for ~20 seconds every minute or two. Took me half an hour to figure out what was going on.

sidcool• 14 years ago

It's beautiful!

tzz• 14 years ago

How does Google able to do this really fast? I mean even faster than a graphic calculator?

Tangaroa• 14 years ago

The math and rendering is done client-side so it's your computer that is faster than a graphic calculator.

Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/768/

btr41n• 14 years ago

When do you think Google search will be able to do the Batman Equation? http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=batman+equation

laconian2• 14 years ago

https://www.google.com/#q=1.5sqrt(-abs(abs(x)-1)*abs(3-abs(x...

laconian2• 14 years ago

http://goo.gl/QTzAq

forgetcolor• 14 years ago

doesn't work on my ipad, WA does.

hendler• 14 years ago

wanted to make something prettier: https://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&output=search...

cdvonstinkpot• 14 years ago

Clickable:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=sin%285.5x%29*cos%285*...

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=1%2F%20sin%2...

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=sqrt%28x*x%2By*y%29%2B...

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=5000-140*%28x*x%2By*y%...

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=sin%28x^2%2By^2%29%2F%...

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=tanh%28y%28y^4%2B5x^4-...

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%28x^2%2B%28%283+y%29%...

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=sin%285.5x%29*cos%285*...

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=100-3%2F%28sqrt%28x^2%...

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=5+%2B+%28-sqrt%281-x^2...

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=100-3%2F%28sqrt%28x^2%...

darien2• 14 years ago

Thanks for reposting webgl.com's cache of equations. I've updated the list here http://www.webgl.com/2012/03/webgl-demo-google-search-3d-gra...

hsshah• 14 years ago

Purely for graphing, I like Desmos. Works great on iPad as well. https://www.desmos.com/calculator

Almaviva• 14 years ago

Oh man, change it to "sqrt(x * x + y * y * y)", and it looks like either boobs or ass, I'm not sure which!

delan• 14 years ago

This is very nice; one addition that would make it even better is support for implicitly defined functions and relationships. If we could graph things like x^2+(y-x^(2/3))^2=1 directly, that'd be awesome.

wcarss2• 14 years ago

I didn't see anyone mention this specific fear, but a lot of people talked about this in the context of competition with Wolfram Alpha. What I fear is that google (on purpose or not) will outshine Wolfram's offering, push W|A out of the game, and then in 3-6 years decide it is not a feature worth keeping up.

Just like code search, viable companies may fail due to Google toying with their entire industry, and then Google may just drop us back to the stone age in terms of that category of product. The fact that this is a fear at all points (in my mind) to some issues of monopoly.

Then again, maybe I'm just too cynical and worried.

smokinn• 14 years ago

I don't fear Google dropping us behind where we are, I fear another IE6.

IE6 back in the day was actually quite good. But because it was really good (among other other more shady things) everything else died off and it stagnated.

What I fear is google keeping us in a local maxima of search and having us stagnate there for a decade.

Iv2• 14 years ago

Don't worry. Little by little, politicians come up with ways that will make it impossible for google to continue its business...

backprojection2• 14 years ago

Couldn't you say the same for anyone who's product is seen as quite good?

FB is holding us back because new, more innovative social networks can't get users to switch, for example.

comex• 14 years ago

Well, this graph viewer is fun, but it's only a tiny sliver of what Wolfram|Alpha can do; if Google wants to "toy with" the industry it will require some more serious toying!

mongol• 14 years ago

Yes agreed. There is so much curated data, and so much experience from mathematics at Wolfram, improving their viewer would not be a big challenge.

taliesinb• 14 years ago

I don't think W|A is going to disappear (I work on W|A). We do a lot more than plot functions of one and two variables -- after all, Apple chose us to power much of Siri's factual question answering.

We're pioneering automatic analysis of new kinds of input, from images to long-form text to raw data (what I work on). We can out-innovate Google, even if they do a really nice job of copying our old ideas.

Of course, sometimes, like with Google Squared, they don't do such a nice job.

Maro• 14 years ago

Plotting f(x,y) is your idea? Come on.

tripzilch3• 14 years ago

Cool! Hey, a tip, and I think I mentioned this in the comment/feedback box on W|A as well:

For some reason, every time I need information that makes me think "hey this would be the typical thing I'd expect W|A to be able to answer, I've seen it answer a similar question before" it hardly ever works ...

And I think a lot of that is due to how most of the demos I've seen are somewhat USA-centered and W|A doesn't have the same data when I query it for a European (or other) country.

How does that work? Because when I use Google or DuckDuckGo and look for that nation's bureau of statistics, fact sheet, even Wikipedia, the numbers are right there. Why is that? I thought W|A is supposed to index the calculatable knowledge for me so I don't have to search for it but instead can just run calculations with it?

Or does W|A just import complete available datasets and does not scrape the web for such data (even when it's in tabular form on an official government or university site)?

In which case, please get some more of those from non-US sources. Loads of governments opened up their data sources:

http://ckan.org/ <-- Germany, Netherlands, UK, France, Canada or are you using this one already? It's CC-BY-3.0 so there's no reason not to.

muuh-gnu• 14 years ago

> some issues of monopoly.

What monopoly? Google doesnt remotely have a monopoly on scientific visualisation, and a possible monopoly on search doesnt really overlap with that.

The problem small companies have with Google is Google's _size_, so many of their side projects are bigger than somebody else's entire business. This absolutely doesnt have anything to do with their headstart in search. Whatever project somebody else successfully starts, Google can simply outspend them and reach the goal first, but this isnt specific to Google, you have this problem with any other big solvent company. WA would have the same problem if a producer of toilet tissue with more cash reserves than WA suddenly decided to compete with WA.

wcarss2• 14 years ago

If you were to take a poll of earthlings asking them whether they've heard of Google and whether they've heard of Wolfram Alpha, Google would resoundingly win. People would also, by and large, be familiar with their search if anything.

If you then asked those people where they would search for an answer to a mathematical problem, or if they wanted to find the meaning of some math equation, it's not hard to believe that they'd google it. Even if they ended up on Wikipedia, they would probably use Google to get there. Before Google launched this feature, people would use the search to (hopefully) end up at Wolfram Alpha. Now, they are likelier (than before) to have their needs met by Google itself.

A monopoly on search is a monopoly on access to knowledge. If Google goes into competition with another provider of access to knowledge, they have a tangible head start. That's where I'm coming from -- I concur that search doesn't overlap with everything, but I think it overlaps at least a bit with this.

Big_Oh• 14 years ago

But I didn't want the graph, I wanted the minimum values!

yuletide666• 14 years ago

woah.

edwardy20• 14 years ago

I didn't have WebGL so I didn't get to see what all the hype was about at first.

For the rest of you who are unlucky like me, here's a GIF a Redditor kindly posted: http://i.imgur.com/58mgx.gif

rcfox• 14 years ago

It works beautifully on my Playbook.

blrgeek• 14 years ago

Feels like a gimmick... Something MS used to do well - take the shiniest feature of a competitor & implement it. The graph plot is just the tip of the iceberg - W|A does much much more, and Google might drop this in a few months if they don't see traction.

I thought Page spoke to Jobs and got a lesson in 'focus' ?

If Google really comes up with a viable competitor to W|A, with all the datasets, math, etc., that's one thing. Just copying the shiniest toy feature is a little dull...

drostie2• 14 years ago

Thank you, Google, for making me uninstall some nVidia packages from Ubuntu that were apparently stopping WebGL from working. The tool you built is also kinda nifty, and I might even use it when trying to help people online with mathematics.

Nonetheless, my day-to-day search traffic is still being offloaded to DuckDuckGo and my day-to-day image traffic is still going to Blekko. It's not you, it's me.

tripzilch3• 14 years ago

Blekko's good for images? I gave it a few tries a while back but I got distracted by the slash syntaxes and forgot what I was looking for :) I'll give it another try.

Today I mainly use Yahoo's image search for images.

Disabling JS on Google Search (with Opera's site-specific preference or NoScript) also does a lot of good to make this once-great search engine somewhat more usable (not for the results, of course, but at least it's not continuously stealing input focus and mucking up its own search results as you try to navigate with your browser's keyboard shortcuts).

drostie2• 14 years ago

I use Firefox's bookmark-keyword feature. It means that I type directly into the URL bar "i cute ducky" and it matches the following bookmark:

    Name: i jump
    Location: https://blekko.com/ws/%s/images
    Keyword: i

Thus it dynamically gets rewritten to "https://blekko.com/ws/cute%20ducky/images as it should.

As you can see, I call these "jumps" and I have a bunch of them. 'o drostie' takes me to http://www.drostie.org/ for example. 'wik Aharanov-Bohm Effect' takes me to the SSL-enabled Wikipedia pages (which used to be in a very ugly place, secure.wikimedia.org, but have now been moved to en.wikipedia.org like you'd expect). There's "def" to define a word, "ety" to look up its etymology, "ark" to look something up in the Wayback Machine, and of course, "s" to search. I like the idea of verbs in my URL bar.

DodgyEggplant• 14 years ago

This single url explains why Google will NEVER catch-up Facebook

wladimir• 14 years ago

Neat!

Would be nice if it had a color bar (legend) to see which color is which value, though. The red/green/blue used below the graph for the axes ranges looks like one, and that is a bit confusing.

wilgertict• 14 years ago

One simple modification. What does this look like: sqrt(xx+yy^2)+3cos(sqrt(xx+y*y))+5

Gring• 14 years ago

Great stuff. I'd love if it kept spinning if I released the mouse button during a movement.

dewiz• 14 years ago

and what about sexy equations

sqrt(xx+yyy)+3cos(sqrt(xx+yy))

ed2417• 14 years ago

This is impressive. Maybe the programmers who did this can speak to the financial charting side so their charts will plot a moving average using data that is actually off the left side of the chart, instead of omitting those points as if the data does not exist.

ioaa• 14 years ago

Integrate[x^2, {x, 0, 1}]

cnyd7811• 14 years ago

sqrt(xx+yy)+3cos(sqrt(xx+y*y))+5

datouxiaodu• 14 years ago

Sqrt(x*x+y*y)+3*cos(sqrt(x*x+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20

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Sqrt(xx+yy)+3cos(sqrt(xx+y*y))+5 from -20 to 20