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    Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers
    Unavailable
    Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers
    Unavailable
    Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers
    Ebook336 pages5 hours

    Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers

    By John MacCormick and Chris Bishop

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Nine revolutionary algorithms that power our computers and smartphones

    Every day, we use our computers to perform remarkable feats. A simple web search picks out a handful of relevant needles from the world's biggest haystack: the billions of pages on the World Wide Web. Uploading a photo to Facebook transmits millions of pieces of information over numerous error-prone network links, yet somehow a perfect copy of the photo arrives intact. Without even knowing it, we use public-key cryptography to transmit secret information like credit card numbers; and we use digital signatures to verify the identity of the websites we visit. How do our computers perform these tasks with such ease?

    This is the first book to answer that question in language anyone can understand, revealing the extraordinary ideas that power our PCs, laptops, and smartphones. Using vivid examples, John MacCormick explains the fundamental "tricks" behind nine types of computer algorithms, including artificial intelligence (where we learn about the "nearest neighbor trick" and "twenty questions trick"), Google's famous PageRank algorithm (which uses the "random surfer trick"), data compression, error correction, and much more.

    These revolutionary algorithms have changed our world: this book unlocks their secrets, and lays bare the incredible ideas that our computers use every day.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateDec 27, 2011
    ISBN9781400839568
    Author

    John MacCormick

    Dr John MacCormick, born in Glasgow in 1904, studied law at Glasgow University and was one of the chief founding members of the National Party of Scotland in 1928 and, with the merger of the NPS and the Scottish Party, of the Scottish National Party in 1934. In 1942 he left the SNP and was instrumental in the forming the Scottish Convention which went on to produce the Scottish Covenant in 1949, upon which nearly two million signatures of support for a Scottish parliament were obtained.

    Read more from John Mac Cormick

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    Reviews for Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future

    4.5/5

    12 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Superb. Really provided the groundwork for understanding different algorhythms like public key infrastructure and digital signatures. By keeping things as simple as possible your not distracted from the key concepts. I'l be rereading this!
    • 4/5
      This is a book about the importance of computer science to the modern world. It is aimed at the novice and intended to generate enthusiasm for a subject that MacCormick feels is underrated and over-determined by a bias to software engineering. His discussions of the abstract ideas that found the various algorithms are admirable in their simplicity and elegance.