Expression editor, symbolic math editor, general questions

Hi all. I was just wondering about the scope or extent of the capabilities of the GH expression editor. I am not a mathematician or scientist, so I am not particularly familiar with these types of tools, but I am beginning to build components for constraint based modeling (if that is not too redundant a phrase). I am wondering if it is it possible to write expressions that wolfram alpha might process, for instance? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Gavin

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Andrew Heumann on October 14, 2012 at 12:58pm

The expression editor just evaluates simple expressions - I don't think it can do anything on the level of complexity of wolfram alpha. However, you can access wolfram alpha directly from within grasshopper - all you need is a WA api key, and Nathan Miller's slingshot to retrieve HTTP requests. Then the trick is just to parse the XML that WA produces, to get the results you're after.

Permalink Reply by Gavin on October 14, 2012 at 3:45pm