Algorithm

JC pontificates about technology An occasional series. →Go uptown Technology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

An algorithm is a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer, or non-questioning drone in Bangalore. An algorithm’s success is predicated on all conundrums within its domain having been finally resolved, so it can operate without obstruction or intervention from a guiding intelligent hand.

Compare with a heuristic.

Of particular interest in financial services:

• High-frequency trading computers follow algorithms faster and more reliably than a mortal trader could dream of;
• The dogma of outsourcing is predicated on a playbook; a form of algorithm for the meatware.

Also of great interest to evolutionary biologists, psychiatrists and philopsophers: According to Daniel Dennett, the great (if unstated) insight of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was that the evolutionary process was a mindless, algorithmic one, that could operate without intervention. This made him a household name when he published Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

Dennett described it as universal acid, and it certainly seems to have burned through a few synapses in the management consulting industry. That piece of magic: that the something of rice pudding and income tax that could come from the nothing of primordrial sludge, without a beneficent creator, is the basis behind the current dogmas of artificial intelligence, and the belief that no intelligence, let alone subject matter expertise, is needed to effectively run a complex process such as (for totally random example) the onboarding of trading counterparties in an investment bank.

See also

• Evolution
• Roger Martin’s The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage
• Heuristic
• Playbook
• Substance and form