Exploring 10 Strange and Fascinating Algorithms – Discover How They Could Impact Your Digital World

By
Fireship
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43
303

for that as well as the countless hours of research and development that went into perfecting it

Algorithms are fascinating because they give us a peek into the underlying structure of the universe and the ways in which we can manipulate it to solve complex problems. From the strange and mystical to the practical and life-saving, algorithms are the building blocks of the digital world and the key to unlocking the potential of technology.

As technology continues to advance, so too will the algorithms that power it. From quantum computing to artificial intelligence, the possibilities are limitless. With each new algorithm, we inch closer to solving some of the world’s most pressing challenges and unlocking the mysteries of the universe.

So the next time you’re writing code or solving a problem, remember the power of algorithms and the incredible impact they can have on our world. Whether it’s extracting a polygonal mesh from a three-dimensional discrete scalar field or searching for a specific string within a text, algorithms are the magic behind the technology we rely on every day. And who knows, maybe one day, you’ll create the next great algorithm that changes the world.

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43 COMMENTS

  2. 0:51, This one I think of like I do streams of water. When you look at the water normally it's surface is always changing, the moment you take a photo of it you're taking a snapshot of it's state. Each snapshot is always different so you'll rarely, if ever, get the same snapshot. Likewise to those particle snapshots, only the content of their stream is probably the essence of information, that is to say God. I say God because of 3 things in the bible, 1st Jesus Christ is declared as the *son of God*. 2nd Jesus Christ is named Emanual, which the angel that told Mary and Joseph this declared was to be interpreted as *God among us*.

    Finally we have the instance where he is described as the *word of God*. God being his own son is confusing by itself yet if we take into account being his own word then we can draw the conclusion that God is information itself, which lines up nicely with how God describe himself, as *the truth*. Think about it, just because you destroy records of information does that mean the information itself ceases to exist? Of course not, if it did then memories would be in constant conflict with reality, science would never progress because of constant contradictions of past versus present, and this very comment would not be possible because computers simply would not have managed to be invented.

    This is what I mean by the *essence of information*, just by seeing anything we see God, because those sights are *information*. Just by hearing we hear God, because those sounds are *information*. Just by touching we touch God, because that touch is *information*. To explain Genesis we just have to take into account that God's speed is infinite as God exists across time & space. For starters, how did he create the world before giving it form? By simply declaring it, just as you do when you assign 3.14… to PI, you're giving it a location to be stored. In programming this is where we allocate memory before initialising it from whatever array of values that it started as to 0 all the way through (for the unfamiliar, this is like using tipex or an eraser on the section of paper that you're re-using for some text).

    I'm not sure what was meant by declaring light as day and darkness as night, maybe he was referring to how we refer to some people as the light of day or the darkness of the night? Or maybe he was referring to the "unanalysable" periods of the universe's creation because they're too bright/dark and that that length of time is what God considers a day & night for himself? Remember the earth didn't yet have people on it at this point so the concept of a day & night being as we know it was not yet formed. Whatever the case you just gotta remember that the current laws and limits of physics etc that science has uncovered just don't apply to the information that declares them in the 1st place so applying our finite view of reality to God is the wrong way to try to understand him in the 1st place.

  16. Actually, the statement "most algorithms belong in a dumpster" (0:30) is far from obviously true.
    If we assume that there is an infinite number of potentially useful algorithms, however scarce may they be distributed, then there exists a function that for every garbage algorithm outputs a unique useful algorithm.

  27. I use screen readers regularly, and back when I was in college, there was a bug in oracle's virtualBox. I called the bug Schrodinger's accessibility glitch, because the way the bug worked is there seem to be a wave function that you have to observe every time you want to interact with the accessibility tree of the user interface. Anytime you observe a property, state, or role of any given node in the tree including traversals. So I would be using my screen reader, and interact with a node for example pressing tab to move focus to a new node and then the screen reader would observe several properties of the focus. Now as soon as focus was observed, the wave function would either collapse to the entire user interface becoming inaccessible forever and I'd have to reboot the entire interface, or the interface would be completely accessible and fine. I don't know what the race condition was that caused it, but there was a very small probability with every interaction that occurred that the entire user interface would become unusable. Over the course of a few minutes using the app it would almost be certain that the interface would become unusable, but it's not like it slowly became unusable it would just suddenly collapse to an unusable state, but until I actually observed a node, there was no telling whether it was going to collapse to useable or unusable. The fascinating observation with Schrodinger's accessibility glitch is that it really didn't matter when the interface collapsed to unusable because until I actually made an assistive technology observe the accessibility tree, it really didn't matter whether the interface was usable or not useable. It was only upon interacting with the state of things that it actually mattered, as if it was randomly switched to unusable, no one would possibly be capable of knowing it was unusable until they observed things.

  35. I thought I'd see quantum annealing on the list. But I did see simulated annealing and quantum computing, I guess that counts.
    (My preserverance came from an internship I did in an uni about quantum annealing, and I did something weird as well I guess? So I made an algorithm to progress Conway's game of life with quantum annealer)

  36. Maybe the sarcasm isn't hitting anymore, but the videos are starting to move closer to Elon Musk stan type of person. The way you brought up Bill Gates and climate change seemed like you were mocking the very idea of climate change. Mentioning Bill Gates' private jet and not his carbon offsetting felt very much like a biased attack. As if you were treating climate change as a partisan issue and not the universal issue it is.

    Mocking people is great, but not if both you and the audience have to intentionally ignore a ton of stuff for the joke to land. Following this up with a joke about a 'final solution' very much felt like you are starting to add right-wing dog whistles. As if you believe there is some grand conspiracy to kill people.

    You've begun to use the kind of talk I would expect from a lighter version of Alex Jones. If you intended to mock, then you didn't have nearly enough inflection in your voice.

  38. sigh The transistor was already quantum. So, if you aren't working with post-quantum cryptography, I am afraid that you are working with very old cryptography much of which was already easily broken in the 20th century if not earlier.

  41. I HAVE "woken up in the middle of the night in a panic wondering how to extract a a polygonal mesh of an isosurface from a three dimensional discrete scalar field".

    I wrote a Java program that displayed molecular orbits that used the marching cube algorithm. That required lots of patience and discipline. Amazing algorithm, though. Your a different programmer after you implement it.

    Great subject for a video!