Last Tech Tuesday was now two weeks ago due to Hurricane Sandy. As a quick refresher, we looked at where the word algorithm comes from, saw that an algorithm is similar to a recipe and gave an example of a simple algorithm for finding a repeated number in a sequence of numbers. Today we will take a deeper dive on this particular algorithm and see at least one specific implementation. All of this is still part of a by now fairly long running series of posts on programming. So revisiting the al...

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post. Those of us who have been around computers for a long time have lived through many letdowns when it comes to AI. The promise was frequently grand (cf various Herbert Simon quotes) but the actual results were disappointing to say the least. But a funny thing has happened over the last decade on the web. The grand promises have (mostly) disappeared and yet the results are beginning to show up! We might not be noticing them because they are not even la...

This is of course one of the all time great (geek) topics: who will rule in the future – humans or machines? I was reminded of it by discussion of Techmeme’s story selection. It should not be surprising that a single algorithm – in Gabe’s case link analysis – is not always successful at picking out the important stories. One of the things that makes our human brains so powerful is that they can more or less in parallel apply many different algorithms and synthesize the results. When we look a...