Algorithms Quotes
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The muscle memory of filtering away all the wrong versions of what you're doing improves the more time you're on a film set. I feel like my problem-solving algorithm got kicked up a notch.
Brad Soderberg
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By 2025, 80 percent of the functions doctors do will be done much better and much more cheaply by machines and machine learned algorithms.
Vinod Khosla
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The burgeoning field of computer science has shifted our view of the physical world from that of a collection of interacting material particles to one of a seething network of information. In this way of looking at nature, the laws of physics are a form of software, or algorithm, while the material world-the hardware-plays the role of a gigantic computer.
Paul Davies
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He considers it for a moment and spits out the seeds, which sprout, quickly, into tiny junk blossoms sizzling with recursive algorithms. The algorithms wriggle through thorny vines, veins of clotted pink juice.
Catherynne M. Valente
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But any distrust regarding the analogy-based approach would soon vanish: at IBM, Kirkpatrick and Gelatt’s simulated annealing algorithms started making better chip layouts than the guru. Rather than keep mum about their secret weapon and become cryptic guru figures themselves, they published their method in a paper in Science, opening it up to others. Over the next few decades, that paper would be cited a whopping thirty-two thousand times. To this day, simulated annealing remains one of the most promising approaches to optimization problems known to the field.
Brian Christian
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The same challenge also appears in an even more fraught setting: dating. Optimal stopping is the science of serial monogamy. Simple algorithms offer solutions not only to an apartment hunt but to all such situations in life where we confront the question of optimal stopping. People grapple witah these issues every day—although surely poets have spilled more ink on the tribulations of courtship than of parking—and they do so with, in some cases, considerable anguish. But the anguish is unnecessary. Mathematically, at least, these are solved problems. Every harried renter, driver, and suitor you see around you as you go through a typical week is essentially reinventing the wheel. They don’t need a therapist; they need an algorithm. The therapist tells them to find the right, comfortable balance between impulsivity and overthinking. The algorithm tells them the balance is thirty-seven percent.
Brian Christian
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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
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I think often people fall into the breadth trap of wanting to do too long a period of time, and obviously there's this sort of algorithm of how much depth you can put into something times how much of their life you're trying to show. My attitude has always been, I'd rather show a briefer period of time in more detail than a longer period of time in less detail.
Steven Soderbergh
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I know how models are built, because I build them myself, so I know that I'm embedding my values into every single algorithm I create and I am projecting my agenda onto those algorithms.
Cathy O'Neil
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Obviously the more transparency we have as auditors, the more we can get, but the main goal is to understand important characteristics about a black box algorithm without necessarily having to understand every single granular detail of the algorithm.
Cathy O'Neil
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The Facebook algorithm designers chose to let us see what our friends are talking about. They chose to show us, in some sense, more of the same. And that is the design decision that they could have decided differently. They could have said, "We're going to show you stuff that you've probably never seen before." I think they probably optimized their algorithm to make the most amount of money, and that probably meant showing people stuff that they already sort of agreed with, or were more likely to agree with.
Cathy O'Neil
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The intuitive standard for rational decision making is carefully considering all available options and taking the best one. At first glance, computers look like the paragons of this approach, grinding their way through complex computations for as long as it takes to get perfect answers. But as we've seen, that is an outdated picture of what computers do; it's a luxury afforded by an easy problem. In the hard cases, the best algorithms are all about doing what makes the most sense in the least amount of time, which by no means giving careful consideration to every factor and pursuing every computation to the end. Life is just too complicated for that.
Brian Christian
