HACKER Q&A
📣 linsomniac

Why Does Wolfram Alpha Think Kamala Harris Is the President Elect?


There's a meme going around where people ask Siri the age of the President and it replies with Kamala Harris's age.

It looks like this is because Wolfram Alpha seems to think that Kamala Harris is the President Elect: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=usa+president+elect

I've known of Wolfram for years and been interested in it, but haven't really used it. Makes me curious what is behind the scenes that could make Wolfram think this. I first imagined something like where people poison Google results by posting a lot of things that cause specific searches to turn up certain people.

Searching for who is the President got the result of "Joe Biden" but with the modifier "in 2 months and 12 days". If I directly ask Wolfram Alpha how old the president is it says that it is reporting Harris' age, and also says she is an attorney.

Really curious, and kinda funny.


  👤 phendrenad2 Accepted Answer ✓
Maybe it's scraping Wikipedia, and someone changed the table structure on the Wikipedia page? Would be nice if WolframAlpha showed it's sources more precisely (it just says "Wikipedia " among others).

👤 richardjam73
It looks like it is pulling values from the Vice President table and combining them with the President table.

Did it always do this?


👤 m0zg
Probably because of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ2mWrejgnc /s

👤 nullsense
Maybe it has crunched data on Joe Biden's health / age and it's predicting he will die before he is sworn in?