

Are Algorithms the Magic Bullet? - Tygerdave
http://calebelston.com/are-algorithms-the-magic-bullet-0

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marcofloriano
In a word, maybe. I think algorithms is like the treasure map ... the way to
get your insight , idea, solution done. Everybody, everyday, everywhere have
ideas, good and bad ones, brilliant and stupids ... but what makes the
difference between what will works, make money and more important, get done,
is the way you implement your idea. I have a personal notebook with dozens of
insights but i have no idea how to implement most of then ... so what´s the
point on having just the brilliant idea ? But when you have an good idea and
then write a good algorithm, you can get your idea very close from reality and
that´s the most important thing. So maybe, yes, the algorithms is kinda kings
in a world where "get something useful done" is extremely urgent.

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J_McQuade
Good comment.

Saying that algorithms are the secret to the success of Google and the like is
like saying that tunnelling machines are what made the London Underground
popular - not quite true. Obviously, once they'd had the idea for the
Underground, designing and building the machines for its construction became
an absolute necessity which allowed them to create a far more wide-reaching
network than previously thought possible - but this ignores the fact that
people would still have used it if it had remained a hand-dug tunnel between
King's Cross and Paddington.

In short, one could say that insight makes things popular while implementation
makes them excellent - and that you should really be aiming for both.

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coderdude
I'm not sure that's a good analogy. People would not use Google if it had
"hand-dug" search results. It's that algorithmic edge that makes Google useful
for finding things.

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wglb
In a word, no. The netflix effort was many, many man-months of inspired work.
And as Norvig points out in a recent paper, "simple models and a lot of data
trump more elaborate models based on less data. ..."

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Tygerdave
Agreed - although Cuil's picture matching algorithm might have been a bullet
to the head

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hc
i'm not 100% convinced this author has any idea what an 'algorithm' is.

 _Algorithms are simply one way of executing on insight, a way that is
particularly well suited to large data sets, no doubt._

huh

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calebelston
Caleb (the author) here. That is a weak sentence for sure. My point here was
that there are many sources of data, and not all are massive and easily
understood by machines. But for those sources that are, algorithms provide the
opportunity to make meaning out of the massive data.

