Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego?

I admit it: I was one of those dorks who was so pumped about the release of Wolfram Alpha that I compiled a list of potential questions to ask the magic machine as soon as it went live. Gripping my pen in hand, I hunched over my Moleskine and scribbled down the questions my inner child most desperately wanted to know the answer to:

1. How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie pop?
2. How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
3. What is the meaning of life?
4. What is the 69th digit of pi? (I actually know this one, since I know the first 180+ digits of pi thanks to this awesome song)
5. Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?

Of all the things I could have asked — and eventually I did get around to asking some good questions. I learned, for example, that there are 7 x 10^{00^22} stars in the observable universe — what I most wanted to know were questions that have been part of my character development since childhood. Questions that are the foundation of my generation. Questions that, in all honesty, I did not expect Wolfram Alpha to know.

I secretly wanted to see it fail.

So imagine my surprise when, after smugly typing ridiculous question #1 into the search box, WolframAlpha returned:

“All right, smartass,” I thought. “I bet the nefarious dudes behind Mathematica knew somebody would ask this. I’m not surprised you knew that answer. Let’s try another.”

So I straightened up in my chair and asked ridiculous question #2. Surely it would have no idea what I was talking about. But, despite the odds (or perhaps not— it isn’t like I have the faintest idea how WolframAlpha actually works) it returned:

Now, if I’m being honest, I don’t entirely accept that as the correct answer. The answer is (according to my own childhood), “He’d chuck as much as a woodchuck could if a woodchuck could chuck wood.” But then again I recognize there are regional differences in these sort of things, and a lot of time has gone by, and seeing as how I don’t think Wolfram went to elementary school in North Hollywood in the early 80’s, I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. 

Wolfram Alpha: 2. Amber: 0.

All right. So Wolfram Alpha could answer some “how much” and “how many” questions. Fine. But what would it do if I threw it a curve ball? Surely, surely Wolfram Alpha would stumble over its Mathematica-founded feet when I asked it the most fundamental existential query of all: What is the meaning of life?

But I probably don’t even have to tell you what Wolfram Alpha had to say about that. Okay, I’ll tell you anyway.

In retrospect I probably should have known better.

By now, of course, I was getting a good laugh not only out of my own hubris, thinking it would be this easy to trick the machine, but also out of how interesting this experiment had become. Sure, I’d only been asking questions about pop culture but those are precisely the kinds of questions I didn’t expect it to have an answer to.

Thinking that it was time to ask it a question it should know, I decided to ask a math question about pi.

I was disappointed that it didn’t sing the result back to me, actually. Because that would have been so rad.

Amazed and more than a little put out that I still hadn’t been able to stump the computer, I thought about my final question. It would have to be a real zinger. It would have to be something deep, something profound whose answer I had sought but still had not found. And after a few moments of soul searching, it came to me in a flash. In a fever, tongue slightly breaching the barrier of pursed lips, I typed out my coup de grâce, my final question, the question I most needed to know: “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?”

I waited while the computer thought. I bit my lip. I bounced a little in my seat, waiting for it, waiting, knowing that I would finally know what my little girl self had never known:

Dashed! Destroyed! My eyes popped open is disbelief, my spine as straight as an arrow as I slammed my hands palm down onto the top of my Ikea desk. “No! No, Wolfram, you do know! I know you do. I have faith!”

I typed the question in again, but Wofram Alpha still didn’t know. It had no idea where in the world was Carmen Sandiego.

I admit it was a cheatful question, because Carmen Sandiego isn’t in any one place; she gets around. (She wouldn’t be a very good thieving villainess if she always hung out in the same spot). Still, I was hoping for something. Anything. Any answer would have been better than what it gave me. After all, when I later asked it, “Where’s Waldo?” it confidently responded, “Arkansas.”

Ah, well. Perhaps it’ll learn still. I have high hopes for it; it’s already performed beyond my meager expectations. As for now, as to the whereabouts of Carmen Sandiego, the world may never know.