Algorithm Quotes

1. "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."
Author: Anthony Goldbloom

2. "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."
Author: Ashley Rickards

3. "Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings."
Author: Barbara Ehrenreich

4. "We've developed algorithms for orgasms, broken it down to a science, I spell out equations on the small of your back, your kisses, the most beautiful calculus I've ever studied. You do fractions and long handed division up my thighs, balance equations between my legs...even my sharp clefts and C-notes can't match our depths..."
Author: Brandi L. Bates

5. "He considers it for a moment and spits out the seeds, which sprout, quickly, into tiny junkblossoms sizzling with recursive algorithms. The algorithms wriggle through thorny vines, veins of clotted pink juice."
Author: Catherynne M. Valente

6. "This has serveral consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms--translation: all your bank account are belong to us--"
Author: Charles Stross

7. "Algorithms don't do a good job of detecting their own flaws."
Author: Clay Shirky

8. "A lot of white-collar work requires less of the routine, rule-based, what we might call algorithmic set of capabilities, and more of the harder-to-outsource, harder-to-automate, non-routine, creative, juristic - as the scholars call it - abilities."
Author: Daniel H. Pink

9. "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."
Author: Daniel Kahneman

10. "Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text."
Author: David Eagleman

11. "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."
Author: Donald Ervin Knuth

12. "I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines."
Author: Douglas Rushkoff

13. "Still, if history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure."
Author: Edward O. Wilson

14. "The Apricot Ice-cream Disaster had cost a whole evening of my life, compensated for only by the information about simulation algorithms."
Author: Graeme Simsion

15. "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."
Author: Janine Benyus

16. "A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out."
Author: Jaron Lanier

17. "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."
Author: Kristina Halvorson

18. "Algorithm"
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

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

20. "An algorithm is like a recipe."
Author: Muhammad Waseem

21. "Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I."
Author: Peter Watts

22. "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."
Author: Richard Ayoade

23. "The more linear one tries to make the equation of planning , the more complex becomes it's algorithm"
Author: Sailendra

24. "Experience is algorithmically incompressible."
Author: Ted Chiang

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

26. "In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds."
Author: Vernor Vinge

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