Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future

The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers

John Maccormick

232 pages, parution le 02/12/2011

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Résumé

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.

L'auteur - John Maccormick

John MacCormick is a leading researcher and teacher of computer science. He has a PhD in computer vision from the University of Oxford, has worked in the research labs of Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, and is currently a professor of computer science at Dickinson College.

Sommaire

Foreword ix
Chapter 1. Introduction: What Are the Extraordinary Ideas Computers Use Every Day?
Chapter 2. Search Engine Indexing: Finding Needles in the World's Biggest Haystack
Chapter 3. PageRank: The Technology That Launched Google
Chapter 4. Public Key Cryptography: Sending Secrets on a Postcard
Chapter 5. Error-Correcting Codes: Mistakes That Fix Themselves
Chapter 6. Pattern Recognition: Learning from Experience
Chapter 7. Data Compression: Something for Nothing
Chapter 8. Databases: The Quest for Consistency
Chapter 9. Digital Signatures: Who Really Wrote This Software?
Chapter 10. What Is Computable?
Chapter 11. Conclusion: More Genius at Your Fingertips?
Acknowledgments
Sources and Further Reading
Index

Foreword ix
Chapter 1. Introduction: What Are the Extraordinary Ideas Computers Use Every Day?
Chapter 2. Search Engine Indexing: Finding Needles in the World's Biggest Haystack
Chapter 3. PageRank: The Technology That Launched Google
Chapter 4. Public Key Cryptography: Sending Secrets on a Postcard
Chapter 5. Error-Correcting Codes: Mistakes That Fix Themselves
Chapter 6. Pattern Recognition: Learning from Experience
Chapter 7. Data Compression: Something for Nothing
Chapter 8. Databases: The Quest for Consistency
Chapter 9. Digital Signatures: Who Really Wrote This Software?
Chapter 10. What Is Computable?
Chapter 11. Conclusion: More Genius at Your Fingertips?
Acknowledgments
Sources and Further Reading
Index

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	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	Princeton University Press
Auteur(s)	John Maccormick
Parution	02/12/2011
Nb. de pages	232
Format	24 x 16
Couverture	Broché
Intérieur	Noir et Blanc
EAN13	9780691147147
ISBN13	978-0-6911-4714-7