Algorithm Design

[italiceyeball]

From Algorithm Design: Preface

"To mention a few representative examples here, we include fairly detailed discussions of applications from systems and networks (caching, switching, interdomain routing on the Internet), artificial intelligence (planning, game playing, Hopfield networks), computer vision (image segmentation), data mining (change-point detection, clustering), operations research (airline scheduling), and computational biology (sequence alignment, RNA secondary structure)."

Sounds like fun! I think they should start teaching this stuff earlier, elementary school. How can you learn to program without algorithms? You don't. It's all syntax and basic operations, like learning a language by memorization: disconnected from meaning. Yes, you need to learn syntax! Obviously. Algorithm design needs to be taught in equal measure. Otherwise we're just pushing the button because it makes the shiny lights blink.

Comments

[fredherman]

Otherwise we're just pushing the button because it makes the shiny lights blink.

That's most of us in most areas of our lives, right there.

[italiceyeball]

If the whole game is rigged you have to suppose that even knowing about it being rigged is suspect.

But-

When are most of us not "just pushing the button?"

[fredherman]

I dunno, the "rigging" doesn't have to an intentional thing on the part of five guys meeting under the Antarctic or somesuch, but rather an emergent pattern in the system we've built via piecemeal, haphazard history. Some may be (are) more overtly guilty than others, and they're black hats; but there's no face at the top.

When are most of us not "just pushing the button?"

Well, yeah, exactly. Though I'd like to imagine creativity an exception. (Or activism, for people braver & less doubtful than I am.)

[fredherman]

Or original scientific thought. Or philosophy, when it doesn't degenerate into pushing buzzwords around. Or physical exhilaration, I suppose.

[italiceyeball]

The problem for me lies in my obsession with hard determinism. That cause and effect determine not just physical interactions but the experience of consciousness itself. Related to the Buddhist who realizes that all is illusion, then realizes that if all is illusion then the idea of all being illusion is also illusion.

[fredherman]

Yeah, but if it's all illusion, and the person perceiving it is also an illusion, so it's illusion all the way down, does it matter? You're still going to either run away from the tiger or, if you're feeling overly compassionate, let it eat you. At some point the "reality" or non- of the situation ceases to matter.

I don't think a hard determinism requires my confusion to be the result of somebody pulling the wool over my eyes. Or rather, yes, there are opportunistic wool-pullers, but they're taking advantage of an already existent leaderless process. There doesn't have to be an evil primus mobile, surely?

[fredherman]

Put another way: sure there are causes, and lots of individual intentional acts causing and being caused by them; but the totality/overall cumulative result is unplanned. Like Linux, I gather.

[italiceyeball]

I assume there is not any primus mobile, or planning of any sort. Nobody is pulling the wool over your eyes because there is nobody!

[therainingtree]

Individuals and institutions are pulling the wool over your eyes, or trying to, all the time, at least in the sense of trying to influence your views; that's what they do. But that's different from positing a planner for the whole big thing.

[italiceyeball]

When I say "There is nobody" I'm making a sort of sarcastic (in a self deprecating way) remark towards my suspicions about people. Namely, that there are none.

[fredherman]

No people? Sometimes one wishes.