Free Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennett Page B

used inviable hybrid. It had a tremendous air of plausibility, but so do many get-in the instantiation, just so long as those causal powers permit the rich-quick schemes that turn out to be empty tricks. Compare it to the prescribed steps to be followed exactly.
    following stock-market principle. Buy Low, Sell High. This is guaranteed to (2) underlying mindlessness: Although the overall design of the proce-make you wealthy. You cannot fail to get rich if you follow this advice. Why dure may be brilliant, or yield brilliant results, each constituent step, doesn't it work? It does work—for everybody who is fortunate enough to act as well as the transition between steps, is utterly simple. How simple?
    according to it, but, alas, there is no way of determining that the conditions Simple enough for a dutiful idiot to perform—or for a straightforward are met until it is too late to act on them. Darwin was offering a skeptical mechanical device to perform. The standard textbook analogy notes world what we might call a get-rich-slow scheme, a scheme for creating that algorithms are recipes of sorts, designed to be followed by novice Design out of Chaos without the aid of Mind.
    cooks. A recipe book written for great chefs might include the phrase The theoretical power of Darwin's abstract scheme was due to several
    "Poach the fish in a suitable wine until almost done," but an algorithm features that Darwin quite firmly identified, and appreciated better than many for the same process might begin, "Choose a white wine that says 'dry'
    of his supporters, but lacked the terminology to describe explicitly. Today we on the label; take a corkscrew and open the bottle; pour an inch of could capture these features under a single term. Darwin had discovered the wine in the bottom of a pan; turn the burner under the pan on high; ...
    power of an algorithm. An algorithm is a certain sort of formal process that
    "—a tedious breakdown of the process into dead-simple steps, can be counted on—logically—to yield a certain sort of result whenever it is requiring no wise decisions or delicate judgments or intuitions on the
    "run" or instantiated. Algorithms are not new, and were not new in Darwin's part of the recipe-reader.
    day. Many familiar arithmetic procedures, such as long division or balancing (3) guaranteed results: Whatever it is that an algorithm does, it always your checkbook, are algorithms, and so are the decision procedures for does it, if it is executed without misstep. An algorithm is a foolproof playing perfect tic-tac-toe, and for putting a list of words into alphabetical recipe.
    order. What is relatively new—permitting us valuable hindsight on Darwin's discovery—is the theoretical reflection by mathematicians and logicians on It is easy to see how these features made the computer possible. Every the nature and power of algorithms in general, a twentieth-century computer program is an algorithm, ultimately composed of simple steps that development which led to the birth of the computer, which has led in turn, of can be executed with stupendous reliability by one simple mechanism or course, to a much deeper and more lively understanding of the powers of another. Electronic circuits are the usual choice, but the power of computers algorithms in general.
    owes nothing (save speed) to the causal peculiarities of electrons darting The term algorithm descends, via Latin (algorismus) to early English about on silicon chips. The very same algorithms can be performed (even (algorisme and, mistakenly therefrom, algorithm), from the name of a faster) by devices shunting photons in glass fibers, or (much, much slower) Persian mathematician, Muusa al-Khowarizm, whose book on arithmetical by teams of people using paper and pencil. And as we shall see, the capacity procedures, written about 835 A.D., was translated into Latin in the twelfth of computers to run algorithms with tremendous speed and reliability is now century by