Big Ideas Reading Group

Saturday, March 9, 4:00 p.m

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

Every day, we use our computers to perform remarkable feats. 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.

Event date: 
Saturday, March 9, 2013 - 4:00pm
Event address: 
1010 El Camino Real
94025-4349 Menlo Park
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