Tags / 19 quotes from 8 sources
#algorithm
100,000 Articles - And The Data Scientists Who Mine Them - Bio-it World
A library, not a graveyard, for research
With this massive catalogue stored in its servers, the PLOS staff has to be very careful that it’s running a library and not a graveyard for scientific research. It would be easy for papers to be buried in the deluge, irretrievable to anyone who didn’t know the exact authors or…
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Four generals for Byzantine fault tolerance
divisions surround an enemy camp. After observing the enemy, the generals must communicate among themselves and come to consensus on a plan of action. They must decide whether to attack or retreat. If they all agree to attack, they win. If they all agree not to attack, they…
A majority vote among the generals
The solution would be to have each of the four generals exchange information with the other generals and take a majority vote to select which data that has been exchanged is correct.
Bitcoin solves the Byzantine Generals Problem
If the Byzantine Generals problem sounds familiar to you, it might be because Bitcoin relies on a solution to exactly this problem to verify the authenticity of transactions and bitcoins. A mysterious programmer (or group of programmers) called Satoshi Nakamoto released the…
Can Bitcoin's origins be trusted?
Since the initial formulation of the Byzantine Generals problem in 1982, it has been the subject of intense academic study and several Byzantine-tolerant algorithms and architectures have been developed. The most famous real-world solution to the problem is Nakamoto’s Bitcoin…
Algorithms herd more than human investors
Today, the stock market is almost completely automated. Complex algorithms execute trades in milliseconds, making decisions involving billions of dollars without any human intervention. Each innovation to these algorithms makes them faster, so that one investment bank can…
Markets disconnected from the real economy
Furthermore, new algorithms that exploit the high volatility associated with distress and crashes are being aggressively developed. The presence of these “agents” in the market can cause self-perpetuating, reflexive hyper-volatility that can spiral out of control. Dr. Sornette…
Choosing the right data from the environment
The key to human intelligence is that our brain chooses the right data out of the environment, and then runs the right algorithms on that data. I say algorithms for lack of a better word, because I do not believe that our brains run algorithms at all.
Building The Next New York Times Recommendation Engine - The New York Times
Collaborative topic modeling applied to the new york times
It turns out that straddling both techniques can give us the best of both worlds. We built an algorithm inspired by a technique, Collaborative Topic Modeling (CTM), that (1) models content, (2) adjusts this model by viewing signals from readers, (3) models reader preference and…
Demystifying Networks
Multimodal networks
A network with two types of nodes is called 2-mode, bimodal, or bipartite. We can add more, making it multimodal. Publishers, topics, you-name-it. We can even add seemingly unrelated node-types, like academic conferences, or colors of the rainbow. The list goes on. We would…
Centrality doesn't mean the same in every network
The newcomer to network analysis loads the author-publisher network into Gephi, finds the centrality of every node, and then makes the nodes bigger that have the highest centrality. The issue here is that, although the network loads into Gephi perfectly fine, and although the…
Flavors Of Prototypes
Feasibility prototypes
These are written by engineers in order to address technical risks during product discovery before we decide whether something is feasible or not. Sometimes the engineers are trying out a new technology. Sometimes it’s a new algorithm. Lately it is often about assessing…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
How chess computers look ahead
In chess, winning board positions are situated deep in the game tree. Chess-playing computers cannot reach these positions by search. It would take too long. Instead, they look ahead only a certain distance. Using a measure which reflects how advantageous a given board position…
Heuristics: good enough approximations
These tactical rules of thumb are called heuristics and crop up in AI systems everywhere. Heuristics don’t guarantee success or correctness, but offer a good approximation. Heuristics are used when more exhaustive and precise methods are intractable.
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
What an algorithm is
An algorithm is a method for solving a problem by going through a precise series of steps. The steps must be finite in number, and if carried out correctly, they guarantee a solution to the problem. For this reason algorithms are also called “effective procedures.” Good…
The Turing machine as an abstract concept
A Turing machine is a device that carries out calculations using only two types of symbols. These are usually thought of as zeros and ones, but any symbols will do. The idea of the Turing machine was invented by Alan Turing, the great British logician and mathematician. The…
The Church-Turing thesis
Due originally to Alonzo Church (arrived at independently by Turing, so sometimes called the Church-Turing Thesis), this thesis states that any problem that has an algorithmic solution can be solved on a Turing machine. Or another way to say the same thing is that any algorithm…
Towards An Ontology Of Software: A Requirements Engineering Perspective
Different codes, same algorithm
A code implements an algorithm. Following Irmak [8], we take here an algorithm to mean a pattern of instructions, i.e. an abstract entity, a sort of process universal that is then correlated to a class of possible process executions. So, two different codes c1 and c2 can be…
A program is not its code, process or algorithm
we agree with Irmak that we cannot identify a program either with a code, a process, or an algorithm. The reason is that this view conflicts with common sense, since the same program usually consists of different codes at different times, as a result of updates4. What these…