The NYT’s Week in Review has a piece on Algorithms. It turns out the word ‘Algorithm’ comes from a corruption of the Latinized version of the name of the Baghdad scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, author of the Arabic treatise “On the Hindu Art of Reckoning†which introduced the decimal number system to the West in the 12th Century A.D.
The author sees ever more complex algorithms that encode human learning, and ever faster hardware, as blurring the man-machine divide. Will evolving algorithms beat AI to sentience? Hmmm…
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Funny how Hindu’s still use more primitive lakh units while everyone else moved on to million even though they originated the technology. Sort of like Sun & Java.