Algorithm Optimization Quotes

As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of the science. Whenever any result is sought by its aid, the question will then arise — by what course of calculation can these results be arrived at by the machine in the shortest time?

Make sure you like, comment and share other people's items. That teaches Facebook what kinds of things you like to see in your feed.

The real use of AI in industry is generally for very narrow pattern-matchers - a better search algorithm, an object-detection algorithm, etc. These things are tools which we can use - for good or evil. But they're nothing like self-aware beings.

To me, the biggest surprise is that Google still functions despite the explosion in the number of sites.

Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.

I love sophisticated algorithms that help consumers in a tangible way.

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.

The book Dynamic Programming by Richard Bellman is an important, pioneering work in which a group of problems is collected together at the end of some chapters under the heading "Exercises and Research Problems," with extremely trivial questions appearing in the midst of deep, unsolved problems. It is rumored that someone once asked Dr. Bellman how to tell the exercises apart from the research problems, and he replied: "If you can solve it, it is an exercise; otherwise it's a research problem."

In fact, the private sector is improving their algorithmic ability to search through big data month after month after month. And, of course, a big government bureaucracy isn't keeping up.

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.