Algorithm Quotes & Sayings

[With AI] Somebody's going to have to think of a completely new algorithm, a new way of doing goal-based planning. — Tim Berners-Lee

There is no algorithm for creativity. — Andy Hargreaves

I hadn't known this about love: that you did not need to deserve it. I thought there was a set of criteria, like a good sense of humor and looks and wealth. You could compensate deficiencies in one area with excellence in another, hence rich, ugly men with beautiful wives. But there was an algorithm involved. That was why I thought I was unloved: I didn't score highly enough. I had made some attempts to improve my score and also told myself I didn't care because that was what women wanted, something fake and temporary, I would rather be alone. And sometimes I was just lazy and would rather code things. But here I was soaking in a bath of my own filth with Lola scrubbing my shoulders, and what algorithm could explain that? That problem was nonhalting. — Max Barry

There is no Algorithm for Humor — Robert Mankoff

In the early part of the ninth century, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a mathematician working in Baghdad, wrote a seminal textbook in which he highlighted the usefulness of restoring a quantity being subtracted (like 2, above) by adding it to the other side of an equation. He called this process al-jabr (Arabic for "restoring"), which later morphed into "algebra." Then, long after his death, he hit the etymological jackpot again. His own name, al-Khwarizmi, lives on today in the word "algorithm. — Steven H. Strogatz

Before adding a new quote please first do a search and make sure it doesn't already exist in the database. — Goodreads

You said capitalism was an inevitability. That human civilizations converged on it. Because it was an effective algorithm to distribute resources and organize labor. — Neil Clarke

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. — Jeremy Stoppelman

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct. — Donald Ervin Knuth

I really wanted to talk to her.
I just couldn't find an algorithm that fit. — Peter Watts

Take gets beamed back to our servers and skimmed by an algorithm reader, which is a piece of software that's maybe as smart as a puppy. It sits up and barks when something really unusual happens in its field of vision. — Warren Ellis

You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller. — John Green

Every creature is a living instruction that runs the algorithm of nature. — Joey Lawsin

One of the ideas of this book is to give the reader a possibility to develop
problem-solving skills using both systems, to solve various nonlinear
PDEs in both systems. To achieve equal results in both systems, it is not sufficient simply "to translate" one code to another code. There are numerous examples, where there exists some predefined function in one system and does not exist in another. Therefore, to get equal results
in both systems, it is necessary to define new functions knowing the method or algorithm of calculation. — Inna K. Shingareva

I've come to understand that each person has to work out their own personal algorithm of courage. No two are the same, and it's no used trying to borrow or copy anyone else's. — J.R. Thornton

Object-oriented programming aficionados think that everything is an object ... this [isn't] so. There are things that are objects. Things that have state and change their state are objects. And then there are things that are not objects. A binary search is not an object. It is an algorithm — Alexander Stepanov

A formal parsing algorithm should not always be used. — David Gries

People are stupid. Why are they so stupid? There is an algorithm for the way humans were designed: love and be loved. Follow it and
you're happy. Fight against it and you're not. It's so simple, it's hard to understand. — Elizabeth Berg

My experience is that journalists report on the nearest-cliche algorithm, which is extremely uninformative because there aren't many cliches, the truth is often quite distant from any cliche, and the only thing you can infer about the actual event was that this was the closest cliche ... It is simply not possible to appreciate the sheer awfulness of mainstream media reporting until someone has actually reported on you. It is so much worse than you think. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Every computer divides itself into its hardware and its software, the machine host to its algorithm, the human being to his mind. It is hardly surprising that men and women have done what computers now do long before computers could do anything at all. The dissociation between mind and matter in men and machines is very striking; it suggests that almost any stable and reliable organization of material objects can execute an algorithm and so come to command some form of intelligence. — David Berlinski

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. — Ashley Rickards

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. — Tim Berners-Lee

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

The difference between human dynamics and data mining boils down to this: Data mining predicts our behaviors based on records of our patterns of activity; we don't even have to understand the origins of the patterns exploited by the algorithm. Students of human dynamics, on the other hand, seek to develop models and theories to explain why, when, and where we do the things we do with some regularity. — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

I took a computer-science course to fill a prerequisite at Stanford, and I realized that every day was a new problem, and every day you got to think about how to solve something new, how to reason through something new, how to develop an algorithm to solve for something you hadn't worked on before. — Marissa Mayer

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. — Larry Page

It was a toss-up which was more pointless: Arguing with an algorithm or talking back to his mother. — Ramez Naam

To get the most out of an algorithm, you must be able to do more than simply follow its steps. You need to understand the following: The algorithm's behavior. Does it find the best possible solution, or does it just find a good solution? Could there be multiple best solutions? Is there a reason to pick one "best" solution over the others? The algorithm's speed. Is it fast? Slow? Is it usually fast but sometimes slow for certain inputs? The algorithm's memory requirements. How much memory will the algorithm need? Is this a reasonable amount? Does the algorithm require billions of terabytes more memory than a computer could possibly have (at least today)? The main techniques the algorithm uses. Can you reuse those techniques to solve similar problems? — Rod Stephens

Though I did not know her exact address, that she appeared to live almost within breathing distance of Robin, and that I lived with him, and that her pictures showed that she was now dating the mysterious Rupert Hunter, our despotic mothers, our absent fathers, the borders we had both crossed, all our many parallels and connections at every point, could not be chance. I saw it as evidence of the hidden connections between things, an all-powerful algorithm that sifted through chaos, singling out soulmates. — Olivia Sudjic

An algorithm is like a recipe. — Waseem Latif

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. — Janine Benyus

The thin-plate spline algorithm can handle local deformations in the map, and is therefore very useful when working with very low-quality map scans. The — Anita Graser

If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear. This is a dangerously narrow conception of the value of privacy. Privacy is an essential human need, and central to our ability to control how we relate to the world. Being stripped of privacy is fundamentally dehumanizing, and it makes no difference whether the surveillance is conducted by an undercover policeman following us around or by a computer algorithm tracking our every move. — Bruce Schneier

The more linear one tries to make the equation of planning , the more complex becomes it's algorithm — Sailendra

An algorithm of infinite symmetry, life serving death by expanding its bounty, furthering its reach. Did the perpetrators appreciate their satire? Yes, it was practical, indignity as revenge, but for what? — Philip Schultz

More than sixty years ago, mathematical logicians, by defining precisely the concept of an algorithm, gave content to the ancient human idea of an effective calculation. Their definitions led to the creation of the digital computer, an interesting example of thought bending matter to its ends. — David Berlinski

When we go online, we commit ourselves to the care of online mechanisms. Digital Band-Aids for digital wounds. We feed ourselves into machines, hoping some algorithm will digest the mess that is our experience into something legible, something more meaningful than the "bag of associations" we fear we are. — Michael Harris

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

There are a lot of people, who want to be writers, who stumble at a blank page. You could imagine an algorithm that could give writers a first draft or a starter kit, so it could enable people to be more prolific in their writing. — Philip M. Parker

Unlike other features on OkCupid, there is no visual component to match percentage. The number between two people only reflects what you might call their inner selves - everything about what they believe, need, and want, even what they think is funny, but nothing about what they look like. Judging by just this compatibility measure, the four largest racial groups on OkCupid - Asian, black, Latino, and white - all get along about the same.1 In fact, race has less effect on match percentage than religion, politics, or education. Among the details that users believe are important, the closest comparison to race is Zodiac sign, which has no effect at all. To a computer not acculturated to the categories, "Asian" and "black" and "white" could just as easily be "Aries" and "Virgo" and "Capricorn." But this racial neutrality is only in theory; things change once the users' own opinions, and not just the color-blind workings of an algorithm, come into play. — Christian Rudder

Each algorithm is a feedback loop, taking an action, observing the resulting conditions, and taking another action after that. Again, and again, and again. It's an iterative process, in which the algorithms adjust themselves and their activity on every loop, responding less to the news on the ground than to one another. Such systems go out of control because the feedback of their own activity has become louder than the original signal. — Douglas Rushkoff

The development of an organism ... may be considered as the execution of a 'developmental program' present in the fertilized egg ... A central task of developmental biology is to discover the underlying algorithm from the course of development. — Aristid Lindenmayer

The word algorithm was derived from al Khwarizm — Jack Weatherford

Quality, relevant content can't be spotted by an algorithm. You can't subscribe to it. You need people - actual human beings - to create or curate it. — Kristina Halvorson

Klout and various measurements of influence are fun. I love to see where I score on them, but there's a computer algorithm behind the calculation. If there's an algorithm, it can be gamed. Even if it's not gameable, you have to take a leap of faith that the number of followers, retweets, mentions, whatever really mean something. — Guy Kawasaki

The birth of the search engine, it's nothing new: it's essentially embedded in our literature; it's how ideas relate, how the mind makes connections. I mean, connections are made online through links, and within an algorithm, they're made through degrees of relevancy between different terms. — Joshua Cohen

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

My well-discussed 'paranoia' urges me to believe that some tiny segment of the NSA's parsing algorithm is finely tuned to my voice. — John McAfee

But you weren't born," I tell him. "I wrote an algorithm based on the Linux operating kernel. You're an open-source search engine married to a dialog bot and a video compiler. The program scrubs the Web and archives a person's images and videos and data - everything you say, you've said before." For — Adam Johnson

A greedy algorithm is an algorithm that shortcuts a full analysis in order to choose quickly an option that appears to work in the situation immediately at hand. They are often used by humans. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Noll tried to register Gaussian Quadratic with the US Copyright Office at the Library of Congress, another body perplexed by the works on display. His request was originally denied "since a machine had generated the work."10 He explained that a human being had written the program that, through a mix of randomness and order, generated the work. The Library of Congress again declined: randomness was unacceptable. Noll finally argued that although the numbers produced by the program appeared random, "the algorithm generating them was perfectly mathematical and not random at all," and the work was finally patented. — Zabet Patterson

An algorithm is a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions. An algorithm isn't a particular calculation, but the method followed when making the calculation. — Yuval Noah Harari

In mathematics, there's a name for this short-term greed, the process of always choosing the option that gives you instant gratification. It's called the "greedy algorithm," and following it almost always leads to a plateau. — Bob Sullivan

If you have a comprehensive explanation for everything then it decreases uncertainty and anxiety and reduces your cognitive load. And if you can use that simplifying algorithm to put yourself on the side of moral virtue then you're constantly a good person with a minimum of effort. — Jordan B. Peterson

Dawes observed that the complex statistical algorithm adds little or no value. One can do just as well by selecting a set of scores that have some validity for predicting the outcome and adjusting the values to make them comparable (by using standard scores or ranks). A formula that combines these predictors with equal weights is likely to be just as accurate in predicting new cases as the multiple-regression formula that was optimal in the original sample. More recent research went further: formulas that assign equal weights to all the predictors are often superior, because they are not affected by accidents of sampling. — Daniel Kahneman

I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six. It's a maxim, an oft-repeated rap lyric, a last-ditch rock and hard place algorithm that on the surface is about faith in the system but in reality means shoot first, put your trust in the public defender, and be thankful you still have your health. I — Paul Beatty

Each distinct cipher can be considered in terms of a general encrypting method, known as the algorithm, and a key, which specifies the exact details of a particular encryption. — Simon Singh

We can now expose perhaps the most common misunderstanding of Darwinism: the idea that Darwin showed that evolution by natural selection is a procedure for producing Us. Ever since Darwin proposed his theory, people have often misguidedly tried to interpret it as showing that we are the destination, the goal, the point of all that winnowing and competition, and our arrival on the scene was guaranteed by the mere holding of the tournament. This confusion has been fostered by evolution's friends and foes alike, and it is parallel to the confusion of the coin-toss tournament winner who basks in the misconsidered glory of the idea that since the tournament had to have a winner, and since he is the winner, the tournament had to produce him as the winner. Evolution can be an algorithm, and evolution can have produced us by an algorithmic process, without its being true that evolution is an algorithm for producing us. — Daniel C. Dennett

We know that no algorithm can solve global poverty; no pill can cure a chronic illness; no box of chocolates can mend a broken relationship; no educational DVD can transform a child into a baby Einstein; no drone strike can end a terrorist conflict. Sadly, there is no such thing as 'One Tip to a Flat Stomach.' — Carl Honore

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. — Jerry Saltz

Heuristic is an algorithm in a clown suit. It's less predictable, it's more fun, and it comes without a 30-day, money-back guarantee. — Steve McConnell

Capablanca's phenomenal move-searching algorithm in those early years, when he possessed a wonderful ability for calculating variations very rapidly, made him invincible. — Mikhail Botvinnik

Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles. — David Eagleman

The happiness is a simple algorithm coded by the crowd or by one or two people! — Deyth Banger

The evolutionary algorithm
of variation and selection, repeated
searches for solutions in a world where the problems keep changing, trying all sorts of variants and doing more of what works. — Tim Harford

What geographic profiling does is it takes a look at the locations of a connected series of incidents - say murders in a serial murder case or robberies in a serial bank robber case - and it spatially analyzes the point pattern of incidents, and creates a probability surface from those, working from the basis of an algorithm that says people offend close to where they live, but not too close. — Kim Rossmo

The fact that the descent of the Quran led not only to the foundation of one of the world's great civilizations, but also to the creation of one of the major scientific, philosophical, and artistic traditions in global history was not accidental. Without the advent of the Quran, there would have been no Islamic sciences as we know them, sciences that were brought later to the West and we therefore would not have words such as "algebra," "algorithm," and many other scientific terms of Arabic origin in English. Nor would there be the Summas of St. Thomas Aquinas, at least in their existing form, since these Summas contain so many ideas drawn from Islamic sources. — Seyyed Hossein Nasr

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. — Max Barry

An algorithm must be seen to be believed. — Donald Ervin Knuth

Bitcoin is not "unregulated". It is regulated by algorithm instead of being regulated by government bureaucracies. Un-corrupted. — Andreas Antonopoulos

Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break. — Bruce Schneier

The burgeoning field of computer science has shifted our view of the physical world from that of a collection of interacting material particles to one of a seething network of information. In this way of looking at nature, the laws of physics are a form of software, or algorithm, while the material world-the hardware-plays the role of a gigantic computer. — Paul Davies

The security of a cryptosystem must not depend on keeping secret the crypto-algorithm. The security depends only on keeping secret the key. — Simon Singh

We think we have the best matching algorithm, we think we have the best members. So why wouldn't we want to just shine the light onto just how our processes work, what the real data are, and let people come to their own conclusions. — Sam Yagan

I'm considering whether or not to believe you. I need to run an algorithm on this."
"That's not funny."
"You might be trying to trick me into sleeping with you. — Jessica Park

I suppose I sort of like effects that have some organic elements rather than ones that are entirely generated by a computer. Just because, no matter how complex the algorithm is, it's still an algorithm. — Richard Ayoade

The problem with digital architecture is that an algorithm can produce endless variations, so an architect has many choices. — Peter Eisenman

Intelligence isn't just about how many levels of math courses you've taken, how fast you can solve an algorithm, or how many vocabulary words you know that are over 6 characters. It's about being able to approach a new problem, recognize its important components, and solve it - then take that knowledge gained and put it towards solving the next, more complex problem. It's about innovation and imagination, and about being able to put that to use to make the world a better place. This is the kind of intelligence that is valuable, and this is the type of intelligence we should be striving for and encouraging. — Andrea Kuszewsk

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. — Michael Shermer

Another lesson is that smart professionals might give an instruction to a program based on a sensible-seeming and normally sound assumption (e.g. that trading volume is a good measure of market liquidity), and that this can produce catastrophic results when the program continues to act on the instruction with iron-clad logical consistency even in the unanticipated situation where the assumption turns out to be invalid. The algorithm just does what it does; and unless it is a very special kind of algorithm, it does not care that we clasp our heads and gasp in dumbstruck horror at the absurd inappropriateness of its actions. This is a theme that we will encounter again. — Nick Bostrom

If someone doesn't have health and wants to get it, he or she will need to adopt an algorithm on how to do that - - perhaps a new diet and workout regimen. If someone doesn't have wealth and wants to get it, he or she will need to adopt an algorithm for wealth building - - perhaps a new investment portfolio. Similarly, in relationships, if someone doesn't have success and wants to get it, he or she will need to adopt the algorithm for success there. I invented that algorithm. — Mystery

Despite all of our technological advances, content creation still requires time, inspiration, and a certain amount of sweat. There aren't any shortcuts. You can't write an algorithm for it. You can't predict it. You can't code it. — Shawn Amos

I'm less interested in uniqueness than in goodness. I see so many concerts where the program notes are more interesting than the music. I remember talking to one composer who went through the most complicated mathematical algorithm to generate some material from scratch. It took weeks and weeks, and he came up with a C major chord. For me, honesty is more interesting than originality. — Anna Meredith

We live in a culture that's been hijacked by the management consultant ethos. We want everything boiled down to a Power Point slide. We want metrics and 'show me the numbers.' That runs counter to the immensely complex nature of so many social, economic and political problems. You cannot devise an algorithm to fix them. — Carl Honore

This is where the world is going: direct access from anywhere to any type of data, whether it's a small piece of data or a small answer but a long algorithm to create that answer. The user doesn't care about this. — Hasso Plattner

Another key commitment for succeeding with this strategy is to support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed. In more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it's captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you're done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, "Shutdown complete"). This final step sounds cheesy, but it provides a simple cue to your mind that it's safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day. — Cal Newport

We don't need less kids, just more middle managers ... — Ryan Fitzpatrick

[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

Our vocabulary may become a real time algorithmic word bank.
Could you imagine having a conversation like that?
Where the meaning of words constantly adapts? — Natasha Tsakos

Fake Math owes its existence to a number of things and people who have inspired and assisted this book on its way into the world. — Ryan Fitzpatrick

We at Google have made tremendous advances in understanding language. Our knowledge graph has been fundamental to that. The new algorithm that we launched today called Hummingbird has been a great leap forward. — Amit Singhal

Human mind is subject to the law of cause and effect.
IF not, THEN you have no idea about IF-THEN algorithm. — Toba Beta

Nature doesn't feel compelled to stick to a mathematically precise algorithm; in fact, nature probably can't stick to an algorithm. — Margaret Wertheim

I'm not anti conceptual art. I don't think painting must be revived, exactly. Art reflects life, and our lives are full of algorithms, so a lot of people are going to want to make art that's like an algorithm. But my language is painting, and painting is the opposite of that. There's something primal about it. It's innate, the need to make marks. That's why, when you're a child, you scribble. — Jenny Saville

No one knows what the right algorithm is, but it gives us hope that if we can discover some crude approximation of whatever this algorithm is and implement it on a computer, that can help us make a lot of progress. — Andrew Ng

Why is an accountant who knows the regulation and codes and takes advantage of tax loopholes that save you thousands of dollars each year good, But SEO's who take advantages of loopholes and flaws in Google's algorithm to bring you traffic that makes you thousands of dollars bad? — Michael Gray

Not only has volume been ratcheted up but expectations have, too. Quiet success
painting a picture, writing a poem, writing an algorithm
is all well and good, but if you haven't become famous doing it, then did it really matter? — Sophia Dembling

I'm continually amazed at how even extremely high performers' lives are often still controlled in some way by their family-of-origin or in-law relationships. I wish we had some cosmic algorithm that actually revealed how much lost performance comes from people having to continually negotiate the intrusion of family-of-origin conditioning and interference into their businesses, careers, marriages, parenting styles, life choices, and the like. It literally becomes crippling to even some of the most talented people out there. In these situations, even if the adult umbilical cord is providing food, it's charging exorbitant rent. — Henry Cloud

I helped start a ceramics company called CPS Technologies. We took it public in 1987 at $12 a share. Three months later, there was this horrible cliff: Black Monday. Fidelity had bought 15 percent of our stock, and their algorithm caused them to dump it all onto the market that day. We dropped from $12 to $2. — Clayton M Christensen

There's a paradox here. If we return one last time to that '50s-era banker, we see that his mind was occupied with human distortions - desires, prejudice, distrust of outsiders. To carry out the job more fairly and efficiently, he and the rest of his industry handed the work over to an algorithm. Sixty years later, the world is dominated by automatic systems chomping away on our error-ridden dossiers. They urgently require the context, common sense, and fairness that only humans can provide. However, if we leave this issue to the marketplace, which prizes efficiency, growth, and cash flow (while tolerating a certain degree of errors), meddling humans will be instructed to stand clear of the machinery. — Cathy O'Neil