Algorithm Quotes

An algorithm must be seen to be believed. (Donald Knuth)
In comparison, Google is brilliant because it uses an algorithm that ranks Web pages by the number of links to them, with those links themselves valued by the number of links to their page of origin. View quote
Michael Shermer
Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break. View quote
Bruce Schneier
I have a simple algorithm, which is, wherever you see paid researchers instead of grad students, that's not where you want to be doing research. View quote
Larry Page
Trees and bones are constantly reforming themselves along lines of stress. This algorithm has been put into a software program that's now being used to make bridges lightweight, to make building beams lightweight. View quote
Janine Benyus
The problem with digital architecture is that an algorithm can produce endless variations, so an architect has many choices. View quote
Peter Eisenman
The emphasis on mathematical methods seems to be shifted more towards combinatorics and set theory - and away from the algorithm of differential equations which dominates mathematical physics. View quote
John von Neumann
Someone from the Internet Writing Workshop sent me a link to the Gender Genie, where you paste in a section of text and it uses an algorithm to detect whether the author is male or female. Or, if you're an author, you can tell whether you're really nailing your opposite-sex characters. I mean, nailing their dialog. View quote
Max Barry
Since 1954, the raw speed of computers, as measured by the time it takes to do an addition, increased by a factor of 10,000. That means an algorithm that once took 10 minutes to perform can now be done 15 times a second. Students sometimes ask my advice on how to get rich. The best advice I can give them is to dig up some old algorithm that once took forever, program it for a modern workstation, form a startup to market it and then get rich. View quote
Maurice Wilkes
The Google algorithm was a significant development. I've had thank-you emails from people whose lives have been saved by information on a medical website or who have found the love of their life on a dating website. View quote
Tim Berners-Lee
What is the shortest way to travel from Rotterdam to Groningen, in general: from given city to given city. It is the algorithm for the shortest path, which I designed in about twenty minutes. One morning I was shopping in Amsterdam with my young fiancée, and tired, we sat down on the café terrace to drink a cup of coffee and I was just thinking about whether I could do this, and I then designed the algorithm for the shortest path. As I said, it was a twenty-minute invention. In fact, it was published in '59, three years late. The publication is still readable, it is, in fact, quite nice. One of the reasons that it is so nice was that I designed it without pencil and paper. I learned later that one of the advantages of designing without pencil and paper is that you are almost forced to avoid all avoidable complexities. Eventually that algorithm became, to my great amazement, one of the cornerstones of my fame. (Edsger W. Dijkstra)
When you write a computer program you've got to not just list things out and sort of take an algorithm and translate it into a set of instructions. But when there's a bug - and all programs have bugs - you've got to debug it. You've got to go in, change it, and then re-execute ... and you iterate. And that iteration is really a very, very good approximation of learning. View quote
Nicholas Negroponte
Essentially, a fuzzy algorithm is an ordered sequence of instructions (like a computer program) in which some of the instructions may contain labels or fuzzy sets, e.g.: Reduce x slightly if y is very large Increase x very slightly if y is not very large and not very small If x is small then stop; otherwise increase x by 2. View quote
Lotfi A. Zadeh
Constructs extraneous to the real world should be eliminated from the analysis model. They may be needed later during design, but not now. For example, CPU subroutine, process, algorithm, and interrupt are implementation constructs for most applications [and should be excluded from the analysis model]... View quote
James Rumbaugh
I really wanted to talk to her. I just couldn't find an algorithm that fit. View quote
Peter Watts
You can harvest any data that you want, on anybody. You can infer any data that you like, and you can use it to manipulate them in any way that you choose. And you can roll out an algorithm that genuinely makes massive differences to people's lives, both good and bad, without any checks and balances. View quote
Hannah Fry
I spend quite a lot of time thinking about how curated our information is. What we watch, what we read, what we buy, often who we talk to, is all shaped and influenced by some kind of a mathematical algorithm. View quote
Hannah Fry
Frankly, the reason I joined MENSA is because I was dating a guy at the time who spoke five languages and could solve a Rubik's Cube literally with his eyes closed because it's just an algorithm. View quote
Ashley Rickards
Where folks like Google have fallen down is in just putting a little review box up, then closing their eyes and letting the algorithm take care of itself. Yelp is a technology company, but also a company that understands how people want to connect with one another. View quote
Jeremy Stoppelman
Nature doesn't feel compelled to stick to a mathematically precise algorithm; in fact, nature probably can't stick to an algorithm. View quote
Margaret Wertheim
You want to evaluate future borrowers, but in order to train an algorithm that will help you identify future defaults, you have to train it and evaluate it on past data. (Anthony Goldbloom)
No algorithm exists for the metaphor, nor can a metaphor be produced by means of a computer's precise instructions, no matter what the volume of organized information to be fed in. View quote
Umberto Eco
Regardless of how secure a communication line is and how unbreakable a cryptographic algorithm seems to be, the weak links are often the endpoints - the sender (before encryption) and the recipient (after decryption) - unless they are code talkers using a language more obscure than Navajo. View quote
Newton Lee
A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms, 'The Clock' is more than a movie or even a work of art. It is so strange and other-ish that it becomes a stream-of-consciousness algorithm unto itself - something almost inhuman. View quote
Jerry Saltz
And so everything you try to say about how the native cognitive algorithm goes astray, ends up being contrasted to their direct perception of the Way Things Really Are-and discarded as obviously wrong. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky