Skip to main content

Once upon and Algorithm - Martin Erwig ***

I've been itching to start reading this book for some time, as the premise was so intriguing - to inform the reader about computer science and algorithms using stories as analogies to understand the process.

 This is exactly what Martin Erwig does, starting (as the cover suggests) with Hansel and Gretel, and then bringing in Sherlock Holmes (and particularly The Hound of the Baskervilles), Indiana Jones, the song 'Over the Rainbow' (more on that in a moment), Groundhog Day, Back to the Future and Harry Potter.

 The idea is to show how some aspect of the story - in the case of Hansel and Gretel, laying a trail of stones/breadcrumbs, then attempting to follow them home - can be seen as a kind of algorithm or computation and gradually adding in computing standards, such as searching, queues and lists, loops, recursion and more.

 This really would have been a brilliant book if Erwig had got himself a co-author who knew how to write for the public, but sadly the style is mostly heavy academic, so the cleverness is rather wasted. Sometimes this comes across in labouring points and at others in spending a lot of effort on what is little more than defining labels for things, rather than providing useful information and context for the reader. It's not that there's not a lot of good material in there, just that it's hard work to dig it out, where I'm sure the whole idea of using the stories was to make it more approachable.

 Part of the problem is that the stories themselves don't always work very well as an analogy for what's happening in the computation. So, for example, in the section dealing with sorting he comes up with the task of sorting the tasks and places that Indiana Jones needs to deal with to find the Lost Ark. The unsorted list includes the likes of: disc, sunbeam, Marion and Nepal. The algorithm used involves finding the 'smallest' element... which somehow we are supposed to instantly see is Nepal. Using numbers would not have been so well-linked to the story, but at least it would have made some sense to the reader.

 Perhaps the low point is the section that uses a part of the song 'Over the Rainbow' (giving us a tenuous story connection to The Wizard of Oz) to examine language and meaning. If you aren't familiar with musical notation, I'm not sure it's a very helpful analogy... and if you are, some of the ways it's used (particular the assertion of what bars are for) doesn't entirely make sense.

 I was a professional programmer for a number of years, but without a computer science background. So I was very familiar with how to do this stuff, but knew nothing of the theory behind it. As such, I found the content of the book really interesting - and the story idea should have made it doubly brilliant - but the execution meant that it didn't deliver anywhere near as well as it could have. Even so, there's a lot to savour, and it's definitely worth persevering to get a feel for why computer programs involve far more than just 'cutting code.'
Hardback:  

Kindle:  

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting.  Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robot-Proof - Vivienne Ming ****

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...
Post a Comment
Read more