Because it turns out she gives you the wrong answer for logarithms. The problem is that she always calculates the natural log, even when that's not what you asked for. There's no way (that I've found) to get her to calculate a common base-10 log. Screenshots after the break...
Note that the value returned when asking for log of two is (incorrectly) the same as the value (correctly) returned for natural log of two.
Because that "Search Bing" link made me suspicious about whether Amazon was calculating this themselves or delegating the operation, I double checked that Bing does in-fact know how to calculate logarithms:
As we can see, Cortana was apparently a good student, and as a result Bing knows how to properly calculate log 10.
I figured maybe it was just having a hard time with the invocation, and that deep down it did know how to calculate logarithms properly if I asked correctly, so here are a few other phrases I tried:
- "Alexa, what is log base ten of ten?"
- "Alexa, what is the base ten logarithm of ten?"
- "Alexa, what is the common logarithm of ten?"
The saying goes, though, that even a broken clock is correct twice a day. That notion applies here, too, as it turns out Alexa is really good at calculating log(1).
Hooray! ;)
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