Algorithms Quotes - Page 2

• In comparison, Google is brilliant because it uses an algorithm that ranks Web pages by the number of links to them, with those links themselves valued by the number of links to their page of origin.

  Michael Shermer

  Numbers, Google, Use

  Michael Shermer (2016). “Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye”, p.177, Henry Holt and Company

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• The Arab world is also the world that produced some of the greatest improvements in mathematics and in science. Even today, when a Princeton mathematician does an algorithm, he may not remember that "algorithm" derived from the name al-Khwarizmi, who is a ninth-century Arab mathematician.

  Amartya Sen

  Names, Doe, World

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Once you succeed in writing the programs for [these] complicated algorithms, they usually run extremely fast. The computer doesn't need to understand the algorithm, its task is only to run the programs.

  Robert Tarjan

  Running, Writing, Learning

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• The development of an organism ... may be considered as the execution of a 'developmental program' present in the fertilized egg. ... A central task of developmental biology is to discover the underlying algorithm from the course of development.

  Aristid Lindenmayer

  Science, Eggs, Tasks

  Aristid Lindenmayer, Grzegorz Rozenberg (1976). “Automata, languages, development”, North-Holland

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• I have a simple algorithm, which is, wherever you see paid researchers instead of grad students, that's not where you want to be doing research.

  Larry Page

  Simple, Research, Want

  Larry Page's plenary lecture at the AAAS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California, www.youtube.com. February 15-19, 2007.

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• The single greatest business opportunity that is now emerging in the global marketplace is the ability to analyze digital log data to trace digital actions and from those traces to develop algorithms that can predict future outcomes with greater accuracy.

  Geoffrey Moore

  Opportunity, Data, Outcomes

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• We are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. That understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.

  David Eagleman

  Running, Cells, Years

  Source: www.goodreads.com

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• You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller, and that's the secret weapon of the bookstore - is that no algorithm will ever understand readers the way that other readers can understand readers.

  John Green

  Book, Secret, Weapons

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• Every computer divides itself into its hardware and its software, the machine host to its algorithm, the human being to his mind. It is hardly surprising that men and women have done what computers now do long before computers could do anything at all. The dissociation between mind and matter in men and machines is very striking; it suggests that almost any stable and reliable organization of material objects can execute an algorithm and so come to command some form of intelligence.

  David Berlinski

  Men, Organization, Long

  David Berlinski (2000). “The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea that Rules the World”, Houghton Mifflin

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• Nature doesn't feel compelled to stick to a mathematically precise algorithm; in fact, nature probably can't stick to an algorithm.

  Margaret Wertheim

  Facts, Sticks, Feels

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• Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. ... The geniuses of the computer field, on the the other hand, are the people with the keenest aesthetic senses, the ones who are capable of creating beauty. Beauty is decisive at every level: the most important interfaces, the most important programming languages, the winning algorithms are the beautiful ones.

  David Gelernter

  Beautiful, Learning, Winning

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• For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the "art of computer programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title.

  Donald Knuth

  Art, Book, Design

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• It is cheaper to pay mathematicians and computer scientists to design algorithms that will eliminate webspamming, rather than to pay lawyers to do lawsuits.

  Jennifer Tour Chayes

  Science, Design, Pay

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• Artificial intelligence uses a complex set of rules - algorithms - to get to a conclusion. A computer has to calculate its way through all those rules, and that takes a lot of processing. So AI works best when a small computer is using it on a small problem - your car's anti-lock brakes are based on AI. Or you need to use a giant computer on a big problem - like IBM using a room-size machine to compete against humans on Jeopardy in 2011.

  Kevin Maney

  Small Problems, Car, Giants

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• Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Struggle, Sky, Punishment

  Barbara Ehrenreich (2009). “Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America”, p.149, Macmillan

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• With recidivism algorithms, for example, I worry about racist outcomes. With personality tests [for hiring], I worry about filtering out people with mental health problems from jobs. And with a teacher value-added model algorithm [used in New York City to score teachers], I worry literally that it's not meaningful. That it's almost a random number generator.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Meaningful, Teacher, New York

  Source: www.salon.com

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• People are starting to be very skeptical of the Facebook algorithm and all kinds of data surveillance.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Data, People, Surveillance

  Source: www.salon.com

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• More than sixty years ago, mathematical logicians, by defining precisely the concept of an algorithm, gave content to the ancient human idea of an effective calculation. Their definitions led to the creation of the digital computer, an interesting example of thought bending matter to its ends.

  David Berlinski

  Years, Ideas, Interesting

  David Berlinski (2000). “The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea that Rules the World”, Houghton Mifflin

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• The problem with digital architecture is that an algorithm can produce endless variations, so an architect has many choices.

  Peter Eisenman

  Choices, Variation, Digital

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• I would argue that one of the major problems with our blind trust in algorithms is that we can propagate discriminatory patterns without acknowledging any kind of intent.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Patterns, Arguing, Kind

  Source: www.salon.com

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• In deep learning, the algorithms we use now are versions of the algorithms we were developing in the 1980s, the 1990s. People were very optimistic about them, but it turns out they didn't work too well.

  Geoffrey Hinton

  Optimistic, People, Use

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• The most important goal I had in mind was to convince people to stop blindly trusting algorithms and assuming that they are inherently fair and objective.

  Cathy O'Neil

  People, Goal, Mind

  Source: www.salon.com

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• Randomness has an incredibly powerful place in our culture. If you think about it, you can see it driving the algorithms that run our information economy, patterns that make up the traffic of our cities, and on over to the way the stars and galaxies formed.

  DJ Spooky

  Running, Stars, Powerful

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• Back in the really early days, the men went out hunting, the women stayed home with the kids, and would hold the kid in one arm against the heart, so that's the left, and with the right arm they would throw. And it turns out you cannot make that calculation in real time. You have to have an algorithm set up. So these brain mechanisms evolved in order to do that, and when they evolved, the thing is that where there is a useful capability it often adapts to places it wasn't evolved for.

  Howard Rheingold

  Real, Home, Heart

  Source: medium.com

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• If you’re concerned about scalability, any algorithm that forces you to run agreement will eventually become your bottleneck. Take that as a given.

  Werner Vogels

  Running, Agreement, Force

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