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 joy of algorithms

[drgonzo59]

Yes, finally, the algorithms are making a comeback. Up until now we just randomly banged on our keyboards until something came out. Now we have algorithms -- a plan that we follow step by step. Wow.

But seriously, a food recipe is an algorithm for all general purposes. All these people are saying is that the machine learning algorithms and match peoples' personalities and buy stock are too complicated for the average Joe Programmer Wannabe and look more or less like a black box. (which if they employ neural networks, instead of say SVN, they are actually black boxes even for the author who wrote it...).

Software Patent Propaganda.

[Erris]

Don't get caught up in the hype here. Algorithms are nothing special on their own. These articles are trying to make them look important, like inventions or physical objects, to further pump up the notion of software patents. It's not algorithms that are evil in GWB's great internet filters, it's the machinery that's been built on top of an otherwise dumb network and free internet that's evil.

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. Algorithms can stand alone or be combined into programs that do things users want. The net result is just another set of instructions that can be considered a larger algorithm. Without modern computing equipment, most of these instructions are useless. Like the article say, "try doing this at home." No problem, if you have a computer but a real pain if you only have pen and paper. Medical imaging devices take advantage of mathematics that was little more than a curiosity when it was first published in 1917. The inventors of the device reinvented the math without knowing it some forty years later but it was not until the 1980s that the devices became practical due to the lower cost of computing.

This article is pumping up the value and utility of business methods. Common sense is a valuable thing, but it's not always an invention and business methods never are.

Re:Heuristics ARE algorithms

[pedantic bore]

That's an elegant metaphor, but someone has misled you.

An algorithm is a precise specification of a process whose outcome is defined by the initial conditions. To cite your example, quicksort is an algorithm -- the outcome of the sorting process is well defined, given the inputs.

But typical implementations of quicksort use a heuristic to choose the pivot element -- median of three, media of five, middle element, etc. These are heuristics because their goal is to choose the median value, but they can't make any guarantee that it will find the median. They can't even guarantee that they will find a good value. In fact, they generally don't even consider all of their inputs! They could choose bad values every time... but on average they don't, and quicksort is fast.

Another way of looking at it is that if an algorithm is correct, it will produce a correct answer for all valid inputs. A heuristic might produce incorrect answers for valid inputs, but it's correct often enough so that it might still be worth using -- especially if a correct algorithm is not known.

You may point out that randomized algorithms have a similar property -- but the difference is that with randomized algorithms the probability of error can be made arbitrarily small. With heuristics, there's no telling.