Algorithm is not a bad word
Named for Arabic mathematician al-Khwarizmi and partially formalized by queer mathematician Alan Turing, algorithms are simply a process for doing things, potentially with a desired result.
An early algorithm we learn in school is how to add two whole numbers together. Using pencil and paper, you can probably figure out what 420 + 69 is. In fact there are multiple ways. You could draw out 420 dots, draw another 69 dots, and count how many there are in total. Or you could lay them vertically, start at the ones column, and compute the digits of the sum.
Algorithms are not strictly related to numbers. What if you’re a teacher and you want to sort homework assignments alphabetically by the students’ names? Well you’ll probably have a process, which involves checking repeatedly if two pieces of homework are out of order (e.g. if you had homework from Bob then homework from Alice, you would swap the two since Alice is first alphabetically).
Another great non-numerical example of algorithms is solving the Rubik’s Cube and it’s larger variants. In the cube solving community, there are algorithms for specific processes, such as rotating corners cubies or flipping edge cubies. Some of these apply to the 3x3x3 cube, others can be generalized to help one solve a 69x69x69 cube.
Algorithms are also beautiful. Visualizing how the data dances around can be incredible. Check out this animation from Wikipedia showing the Heapsort algorithm in action:
This inspired the hell outta me when I first saw it in 2007. That diagram a couple seconds in, where it just sounds like it’s emitting a thunky beep at ya before suddenly just putting everything together. The way there’s sort of a pattern before it. Just that sheer magic.
You can also make art out of algorithms. From my username, one of my favorite categories is maze generation algorithms. Think Labyrinth, whose algorithm page I just linked, was an early website I found on the Internet, and I’m so happy it has survived the various eras of web evolution. The Maze of Theseus in particular was a huge inspiration for me after printing it out in 2000 on a summer road trip.
Alas Think Labyrinth is from before the days of heavy animations on the Internet, so to visualize a maze algorithm I will instead link to Mike Bostock’s article on Visualizing Algorithms. It includes many dynamic animations that are rendered in your browser, including the sorting algorithms and maze generation algorithms mentioned above, among many others.
So why the hate for algorithms?
On Tumblr in the past few days, and more generally social media in the past decade, we recently saw favoritism for sorting algorithms that allow us to view our feeds in chronological order. Many claimed they were opposed to an algorithm that decided in a corporate-specific manner what we should see first. Let me be clear: the corporate ordering of a feed is bad, but it is not bad because it’s an algorithm. It’s bad because it’s not one of the algorithms that users want for ordering their feed.
The other negative use case grew heavily in the past 15 years: algorithms that are “trained” on biased and/or unethically obtained data. We’ve seen many examples of systems that were trained on data sets of white college students such as facial recognition technology, which then later gets implemented at a large scale and fucks over people of color. The past couple years we’ve seen a rise in creating data sets based on scraping millions of artists’ works without any permission from the artists themselves*. Either of these applied to a corporate or government scale leads to active harm to populations already at risk and probably some new ones too.
Finally, we’ve seen a rise in computer automation for things that should be done by people. I can’t find the specifics, but this quote is allegedly from a 1979 IBM presentation:
A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.
My first thought on where this comes up is applying for jobs. Many companies will use a poorly thought out algorithm to filter through job applications, simply scanning for a couple key words they want (programmers who know Vulkan or Node.js) or more maliciously looking for words they don’t want (needing any kind of accommodation, sounding too anti-capitalist, etc). These algorithms cannot be held accountable and should not be involved in any stage of the hiring process.
Quick aside:Â When I was searching for the source of that quote about accountability, I typed in the first half in Google, and the autocomplete was
Fucking modern Google.
Some concluding thoughts
I like algorithms. They are a passion of mine. When people say algorithms are evil, I’m sad. When people recognize the usage of certain algorithms in certain contexts are evil, I’m more happy (yet still disturbed these things happen). I just really wanted to educate people on the usage of the word.
Also, algorithms are not about Al Gore’s dance moves. Please stop with that stupid fucking joke.
*I mentioned scraping data from millions of images without permission of the creators. My one iffy status with this is how sort of applies to the human brain doing a similar process over the span of one’s life. What is it that separates my looking through a book of Escher’s works from a computer looking at it?
Obviously many things, but I’m horrendous as philosophy and ethics, so I’m just gonna stay in my comfort zone of pure algorithms and try not to get too involved. Experts can figure out a more formal definition for what I can only describe as a gut feeling.
