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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.'"
and often hilarious or silly. People already trust computers too much.
I just (a few minutes ago) found this free PDF book about algorithms (written for the undergrad-level student). It's pretty good: http://beust.com/algorithms.pdf
Said one computer scientist getting his day in the sun:
"I'm melting, I'm melting!"
Math is a really really powerful tool.
Whereas algorithms are instantly aware of their own prowess.
Is management starting to wonder (again) whether a computer can really do a better job making the important decisions? But can it yet? There is so much data that needs to be acquired in order to return a meaningful answer.
Some of the most powerful organizations are probably making deals to combine as many databases as possible. Interesting to see (if they would let us see) if that will give them the answers they're looking for. As data acquisition becomes more accurate and less expensive, there will be less privacy but more creative computer output, a trade-off in the value of personal information leading to the possible marginalization of humanity.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
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...).
Sheesh! Someone needs to spend some time with a dictionary.
If only we could have a gradual (or sudden) awareness of the power of heuristics and modeling ...
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Don't worry, Bush will be gone soon, and then everything will be fine.
maybe not as beautiful as 'clasic' ones, but algorithms indeed. Something like shapes, you know, 'clasic' algorithms (ie: sort) are somewhat like circles (simple formulaes) but real objects (ie: leafs) are extremely complex formulaes only approximated by fractals and with a lot of 'heuristics' in it.
What's in a sig?
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?
As you've demonstrated, the "oracular" part is badly mistaken.
Amazon almost NEVER guesses something I'd buy.
If I buy a new DVD, I am instantly bombarded with ads for EVERY new DVD. I buy the new Terry Pratchett book and I'm bombarded with EVERY book by him or co-authored by him or licensed by him or whatever. I don't want derivatives.
I picked up the "V" comic book (graphic novel) and now I'm bombarded with every comic book they have.
As relates to your post, you can't be the only techo neo-pagan out there. But they just cannot fit you to that group, can they? Although it should be very, very easy to do so.
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.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Drums that raise our awareness of global warming.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law)
just how close are we to having this statement be 'real' to a large majority of people on this planet? discounting any second or third world countries, how many people in first world countries would consider the 'oracular' nature of an algorithm to be 'magical'?
the education system spread throughout the world is creating an over and under society incapable of distinguishing high technology from magical sources. yep, this can only bode well for the future of humanity.
'i pray to you lord skynet, pls water my crops on the back 40!!!11 here is a sacrifice to your computations.....'
This is completely idiotic. All logic works based on algorithms, whether it's in your head or in a computer. Only a monkey or someone with an agenda would write such article. "The Gradual Public Awareness of the Might of Algorithms" eh???????????????????
I'm a graduate student in CS right now. One of the things I'm researching is stochastic approximation heuristics. Without any argument, these are algorithms. They have to be algorithms, or else the Church-Turing Thesis doesn't apply and we wouldn't be able to have computers do them at all.
An algorithm is, broadly speaking, a terminating sequence of deterministic steps that effectively derives outputs from provided inputs. But don't believe me--after all, I'm just a random guy on Slashdot. But maybe Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein's Introduction to Algorithms should be believed:
Don Knuth has an equivalent definition of algorithm in The Art of Computer Programming. He makes explicit a couple of details which are implicit in the CLRS definition, but other than that they're interchangeable. Knuth talks about the effectiveness of algorithms, in that an algorithm must uphold the promises the programmer makes about it.
So now that we've got a decent definition of "algorithm", one that's approved by five of the brightest lights in computer science, let's look at simulated annealing. This is a stochastic (random) heuristic approximation process. You say it's not an algorithm, because sometimes it'll give barkingly wrong answers. I say it is. So let's look at our definition of algorithm, and see whether it is or not.
It's well-defined, in that every step of the process has mathematical clarity and precision. It's deterministic, in that if I feed it the exact same inputs (including initializing the pseudorandom number generator to the same seed value), I get the exact same outputs. It will always terminate, thanks to a counter that limits the annealing process to a couple of million operations. And finally, it is effective, in that it upholds the promises I, the programmer, make about the outputs.
According to your reasoning, it fails on the effectiveness criteria. It's not an algorithm because it doesn't solve NP-COMPLETE problems, it simply approximates them. But that's a straw man argument: I never claimed it solved NP-COMPLETE problems, therefore the effectiveness of the algorithm is not determined by whether it solves NP-COMPLETE problems.
"People that bought this random hentai also bought dirty underwear."
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?