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The Gradual Public Awareness of the Might of Algorithms
Soylent Mauve writes "The trend toward data- and algorithm-driven tuning of business operations has gotten a lot of attention recently — check out the recent articles in the New York Times and the Economist. It looks like computer scientists, especially those with machine learning training, are getting their day in the sun. From the NYT piece: 'It was the Internet that stripped the word of its innocence. Algorithms, as closely guarded as state secrets, buy and sell stocks and mortgage-backed securities, sometimes with a dispassionate zeal that crashes markets. Algorithms promise to find the news that fits you, and even your perfect mate. You can't visit Amazon without being confronted with a list of books and other products that the Great Algoritmi recommends. Its intuitions, of course, are just calculations -- given enough time they could be carried out with stones. But when so much data is processed so rapidly, the effect is oracular and almost opaque.'"
Said one computer scientist getting his day in the sun:
"I'm melting, I'm melting!"
Math is a really really powerful tool.
When I opened that PDF, my Windows calculator automatically launched, performed all of the calculations, and logged the results to notepad. Amazing!
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
Absolutely. I belong to several Yahoo and Google Groups geared at the neopagan crowd, and because the groups are categorized as 'religious' groups, the advertising always contains advertisements for 'End Times' books and appeals to join the United Methodist Church, etc. Then again, maybe this the algorithms are doing just what they're supposed to do ... :)
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