Book contents
- The Age of Algorithms
- The Age of Algorithms
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Algorithms Intrigue, Algorithms Disturb
- 2 What Is an Algorithm?
- 3 Algorithms, Computers, and Programs
- 4 What Algorithms Do
- 5 What Algorithms Don’t Do
- 6 Computational Thinking
- 7 The End of Employment
- 8 The End of Work
- 9 The End of Property
- 10 Governing in the Age of Algorithms
- 11 An Algorithm in the Community
- 12 The Responsibility of Algorithms
- 13 Personal Data and Privacy
- 14 Fairness, Transparency, and Diversity
- 15 Computer Science and Ecology
- 16 Computer Science Education
- 17 The Augmented Human
- 18 Can an Algorithm Be Intelligent?
- 19 Can an Algorithm Have Feelings?
- 20 Time to Choose
2 - What Is an Algorithm?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2020
- The Age of Algorithms
- The Age of Algorithms
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Algorithms Intrigue, Algorithms Disturb
- 2 What Is an Algorithm?
- 3 Algorithms, Computers, and Programs
- 4 What Algorithms Do
- 5 What Algorithms Don’t Do
- 6 Computational Thinking
- 7 The End of Employment
- 8 The End of Work
- 9 The End of Property
- 10 Governing in the Age of Algorithms
- 11 An Algorithm in the Community
- 12 The Responsibility of Algorithms
- 13 Personal Data and Privacy
- 14 Fairness, Transparency, and Diversity
- 15 Computer Science and Ecology
- 16 Computer Science Education
- 17 The Augmented Human
- 18 Can an Algorithm Be Intelligent?
- 19 Can an Algorithm Have Feelings?
- 20 Time to Choose
Summary
In order to understand what an algorithm is, let’s begin by taking a trip back a few millennia in the past to imagine one of our distant ancestors who had seen his late grandmother bake bread and then tries it himself. He doesn’t really know what to do. He hesitates, starts by boiling grains of wheat in water, then realizes it might be a bad idea. He does what we all do when confronted with a problem that we don’t know how to resolve: we think of solutions, we try them out, we feel our way, counting on a touch of serendipity until we succeed, or not.
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- Information
- The Age of Algorithms , pp. 5 - 18Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020