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This headline came from today's <i>Washington Post</i>, in a long above-the-fold article about Facebook's policies in determining what users see when they "like" a post. The article does not define the word, but describes an algorithm as "...a system that
decides on a post's position on the news feed based on predictions about each user's preferences and tendencies." That sounds to me like a complex piece of software, with perhaps hundreds of lines of code, that takes in a lot of variables and produces a potentially
wide range of outputs. It conjures up an image of something sinister and menacing. Not what Knuth defined as an "algorithm" in Volume One of his
<i>Art of Computer Programming</i>. His definition has been refined over the years, but it retains the notion of a well-defined, finite set of steps that produces an unambiguous result.</div>
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Should we be bothered that the <i>Post</i> (and I assume other newspapers) are not using the term properly? Are people now going to think of an "algorithm" as something threatening, like<span style="background-color:rgb(255, 255, 255);display:inline !important"> "The
Blob" in that famous Steve McQueen movie</span>? </div>
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Paul Ceruzzi</div>
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Tom Haigh & Paul Ceruzzi, <i>A New History of Modern Computing</i> (MIT Press 2021) </div>
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