Thanks, I almost didn’t post because it was an essay of a comment lol, glad you found it insightful

As for Wolfram Alpha, I’m definitely not an expert but I’d guess the reason it was good at math was that it would simply translate your problem from natural language into commands that could be sent to a math engine that would do the actual calculation.

So basically act like a language translator but for typed out math to a programming language for some advanced calculation program (like wolfram Mathematica)

Again, this is just speculation because I’m a bit too tired to look into it rn, but it seems plausible since we had basic language translators online back then (I think…) and I’d imagine parsing written math is probably easier than natural language translation