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.'"

Comments

The Importance of a CS Degree

[Enonu]

This is one of the reason why getting a CS degree is important, despite what the ignorant masses say in the IT industry. Sure writing lame CRUD applications will satisfy your average customer's needs, but sophisticated algorithms are what provide value beyond a simple shopping cart.

If you're still entrenched in the thought that a CS degree "isn't needed for what I do," then let me propose a somewhat common problem. Suppose your client wants the built in reporting in your web application to minimize the amount of noise introduced by users who forget their password and create a new account rather than resetting it. It's up to you to write code to detect these duplicate accounts. How do you begin doing this beyond simple string comparisons?

Re:This Just In

[GuyMannDude]

Math is a really really powerful tool.

While that may be obvious for slashdot readers, it's news to the general public. I remember an endless number of conversations, even as recent as a few years ago, in which people would ask "Can you do anything with that degree other than teach?" upon learning that I was a mathematician. I think it's great that the public is starting to realize that math makes the world go around. God forbid, the gradual public awareness of the power of math might even lead to kids wanting to pay attention in class. While there are drawbacks to this (e.g., the deluge of college kids taking business-oriented mathematics programs with the expectation of a six-figure salary once they graduate), I'm generally happy to see math and computer science get their days in the sun.

GMD

Re:Oracular, opaque...

[mahmud]

The day the computers can read what we're looking at and know us well enough to offer an even remotely successful guess at what comes next will be the day the computer decides it doesn't need us anymore. And I think we all know what happens when the computers decide they don't need us anymore. No.

Don't apply your intuition concerning human beings to other intelligent systems. A true AI may or may not decide it doesn't need us, depending on how it's programmed.

You ignore the fact that stand-alone sentience has little to do with our evolution-dictated habits (e.g. getting rid of competing group/species/whatever). You assume that all the evolution-dictated behaviour and thinking patterns embedded in human brain will somehow automagically manifest themselves in a true strong-AI machine, a view with which I disagree.

Re:Software Patent Propaganda.

[ShakaZ]

Without algorithms, there can be no computing but there's nothing really special about any one in particular. Algorithms are just instructions, and there are many ways of achieving the same result. There are indeed many ways of achieving the same results. However some algorithms are much more efficient than others and when a large program is made up of many of those optimised algorithms there will be a huge speed improvement over other implementations.
This is especially important in resource-hungry applications, scientific calculation or on systems with constrained resources such as embedded systems.

Saying there's nothing special about any algorithm is simply dumb.