Quotes About Algorithms

“For his birthday, she'd bought him an iPhone, which he'd returned to the store. He'd apologized, saying that it was a thoughtful gift, but he didn't want to carry a tiny high-powered mainframe on which he could compute astronomical algorithms, or check Facebook. He wanted a phone.”

— Laura Kasischke

“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains - cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.”

— Peter Watts

“Consider a cognitive scientist concerned with the empirical study of the mind, especially the cognitive unconscious, and ultimately committed to understanding the mind in terms of the brain and its neural structure. To such a scientist of the mind, Anglo-American approaches to the philosophy of mind and language of the sort discussed above seem odd indeed. The brain uses neurons, not languagelike symbols. Neural computation works by real-time spreading activation, which is neither akin to prooflike deductions in a mathematical
logic, nor like disembodied algorithms in classical artificial intelligence, nor like derivations in a transformational grammar.”

— George Lakoff

“We've developed algorithms for orgasms, broken it down to a science, I spell out equations on the small of your back, your kisses, the most beautiful calculus I've ever studied. You do fractions and long handed division up my thighs, balance equations between my legs ... even my sharp clefts and C-notes can't match our depths ...”

— Brandi L. Bates

“Was greed that broke Wall Street, not the lack of financial algorithms.”

— Joan D. Chittister

“Formula creation is magnitudes harder for computer algorithms than actually executing within a formula. But once the genre is created and the formula is known, then the computer can do the repetitive task of executing within the genre.”

— Philip M. Parker

“When The Daily Muse initially wanted to launch a job board, our first ideas were insanely (and needlessly) complex. We wanted to integrate with social networks, gather rich personal data to build predictive algorithms, and put together numerous cool visualization tools before launching out to the world. We were just sure users would love it!”

— Kathryn Minshew

“Computing should be taught as a rigorous - but fun - discipline covering topics like programming, database structures, and algorithms. That doesn't have to be boring.”

— Geoff Mulgan

“The Apricot Ice-cream Disaster had cost a whole evening of my life, compensated for only by the information about simulation algorithms.”

— Graeme Simsion

“Learn when and how to use different data structures and their algorithms in your own code. This is harder as a student, as the problem assignments you'll work through just won't impart this knowledge. That's fine.”

— Robert Love

“Why are experts inferior to algorithms? One reason, which Meehl suspected, is that experts try to be clever, think outside the box, and consider complex combinations of features in making their predictions. Complexity may work in the odd case, but more often than not it reduces validity. Simple combinations of features are better.”

— Daniel Kahneman

“Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws.”

— Clay Shirky

“As the border between physical and digital gets more permeable, a new kind of literacy emerges. And that literacy is built on a foundation of code - whether it's the codes of letters and words, or the code of bits and algorithms.”

— John Battelle

“In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds.”

— Vernor Vinge

“I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.”

— Donald Knuth

“It's difficult to make your clients understand that there are certain days that the market will go up or down 2%, and it's basically driven by algorithms talking to algorithms. There's no real rhyme or reason for that. So it's difficult. We just try to preach long-term investing and staying the course.”

— Warren Stephens

“I want to talk about privacy, the quality of the information you receive, whether it's neutral or commercial or pointed, bringing consciousness to the lack of neutrality in the algorithms.”

— Beeban Kidron

“Despite the metadata attached to each tweet, and despite trails of retweets and 'favorite' tweets, the Twitter corpus lacks the latticework of hyperlinks that makes Google's algorithms so potent. Twitter's famous hashtags - #sandyhook or #fiscalcliff or #girls - are the crudest sort of signposts, not much help for smart searching.”

— James Gleick

“This has serveral consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms
translation: all your bank account are belong to us
”

— Charles Stross

“To understand the limits and opportunities of algorithms in the context of artistic creation, we need to understand that the latter usually consists of three elements: discovery, production, and recommendation.”

— Evgeny Morozov

“They were innocent people. They could just do things you couldn't imagine. I can see code, do you get it? Algorithms that confound straights are just patterns to me. They come in my dreams. I dream the most beautiful programs never written.”

— Marcus Sakey

“Genetic algorithms (GAs) are defined as search procedures based on the mechanics of natural selection and genetics, and we think we know what innovation is - at least in some sort of qualitative way - but what does one have to do with the other?”

— David Edward

“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

“The classes of problems which are respectively known and not
known to have good algorithms are of great theoretical interest. [ ... ]
I conjecture that there is no good algorithm for the traveling
salesman problem. My reasons are the same as for any mathematical
conjecture: (1) It is a legitimate mathematical possibility, and
(2) I do not know.”

— Jack Edmonds

“Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.”

— Rob Pike

“Enchanting is not the word that would immediately spring to mind when describing a play that deals with fractal geometry, iterated algorithms, chaos theory and the second law of thermodynamics, but it is a perfect fit for Tom Stoppard's astonishing 1993 play, which is as beautiful as it is brilliant. This is one Stoppard drama that you don't have to be Einstein to understand
you can feel it as well as think it. ( ... ) Breathtaking, exhilarating and deeply satisfying.”

— Lyn Gardner

“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

“Nothing will ever replace the experience of wandering haphazardly through a great bookstore, no matter how many algorithms are developed to find matches for our tastes. That's because not only is there no accounting for taste, there is no predicting it either.”

— Dominique Browning

“Mathematics my foot! Algorithms are mathematics too, and often more interesting and definitely more useful.”

— Doron Zeilberger

“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

“Fancy algorithms are slow when N is small, and N is usually small.”

— Rosamund Pike

“We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites. As always, we'll keep our ears open for feedback on ways to iterate and improve our ranking algorithms toward that goal.”

— Matt Cutts

“Many [business] people focus on what is static, black and white. Yet great algorithms can be rewritten. A business process can be defined better. A business model can be copied. But the speed of execution is dynamic within you and can never be copied. When you have an idea, figure out the pieces you need quickly, go to market, believe in it, and continue to iterate.”

— Gurbaksh Chahal

“In popular books and articles, information technology writer Carr has worried over the ways that algorithms like those employed by Google are reshaping the ways we think.”

— Nicholas G. Carr

“Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.”

— Carl Benjamin Boyer

“We have a lot of argument about laws but none of it solves the problem. Let's examine what happened, why did we miss the Tsarnaev brothers, why did we miss the San Bernardino couple? It wasn't because we had stopped collected metadata it was because, I think, as someone who comes from the technology world, we were using the wrong algorithms.”

— Carly Fiorina

“These algorithms, which I'll call public relevance algorithms, are-by the very same mathematical procedures-producing and certifying knowledge. The algorithmic assessment of information, then, represents a particular knowledge logic, one built on specific presumptions about what knowledge is and how one should identify its most relevant components. That we are now turning to algorithms to identify what we need to know is as momentous as having relied on credentialed experts, the scientific method, common sense, or the word of God.”

— Tarleton Gillespie

“Humans are very good at making algorithms work eventually.”

— Usama Fayyad

“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

“The TMS is evolving into a logistics platform that can handle all nodes, all geographies and all transportation nodes. It's already talking to other applications in the supply chain, like warehouse management, order management and ERP systems. By adding underlying algorithms, a TMS can now understand the relationship between the cost of inventory and the cost of transportation and come up with an optimal solution to answer those questions.”

— John Murphy

“There's a belief that whatever it is I'm looking for is out there, but I have a really difficult time finding it. Search algorithms alone are falling short in being able to provide real context around information.”

— Chris Shipley

“More data beats clever algorithms, but better data beats more data.”

— Peter Norvig

“We dont have better algorithms, we just have more data”

— Peter Norvig

“[The Euclidean algorithm is] the granddaddy of all algorithms, because it is the oldest nontrivial algorithm that has survived to the present day.”

— Donald Knuth

“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

“My particular focus at the moment is on the development of genetic algorithms and neural networks that work together to create computer architectural systems.”

— Frederick Lenz

“I design genetic algorithms, neural network and artificial intelligence systems.”

— Frederick Lenz

“When we miss with all the metadata collection we've had, the San Bernardino couple and the Tsarnaev brothers, what that suggests to me is that we are using the wrong algorithms to search through all this data.”

— Carly Fiorina

“There's a whole company called Palantir that does nothing but derive and create algorithms riches to search through big data. We're not using their capabilities. For heaven's sake, some of this is just ineptitude.”

— Carly Fiorina

“It is raining DNA outside. On the bank of the Oxford canal at the bottom of my garden is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air ... spreading DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds ... It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs.”

— Richard Dawkins