Personal opinion, but I think this is probably good for professors / post-docs, but a horrible idea for the software community as a whole. Algorithm patenting and closed gardens are probably the worst hinderances to software development that exist right now. It feeds the big boys, who can easily pay, while imposing additional taxes on new folks. Marching Cubes is the classic example of this, but its easy to think of others. Lets say they pattent holographic image recognition / stabilization, or O(N) methods for N-body simulation, or pattern recognition that order of magnitude outstrips SVD or K-means methods. Then everything will have a choice: pay them their pound, use it without paying, or find a functionally similar version that is so different as to not terrify everyone of lawsuit hell. Marching cubes, you only managed to set graphics back by 17 years, meet marching tets.
I can't help but have a strongly negative opinion of anybody who would use this service.<p>IMO implementing algorithms is what computer programming and software development are all about. It's the fun part of the job. A person buying an algorithm as a web service makes me wonder why the person even became a software engineer at all.<p>Not to mention that if this idea takes off, it will ruin it for the rest of us by encouraging algorithm researchers to patent new algorithms and not publish them.<p>I do wonder, though, if a person won't look for a freely available, openly published algorithm, why would they look at this service for an algorithm they have to pay for?
Here's how I'd like this to work. Each algo is implemented server side on well specified hardware. I can upload sample data to benchmark the algorithm. After reviewing the results I could then pay a small amount for the source code in a language of my choosing (or language + bindings).<p>All code would be unrestricted and the value-add would be in the search, review, and benchmarking functionality of the service.<p>This is the same model that makes me pay Amazon for instant video rather than nothing to TPB.
The project listed in the article, <a href="http://algorithmia.com/" rel="nofollow">http://algorithmia.com/</a> looks like it's a web service.<p>Anyone that's used/written algorithms knows they need to be run natively on your machine/server to run the fastest. Calling a web service will slow this down greatly.<p>If this site was turned into a marketplace of code listed for each algorithm that can automatically translate between languages, I could see it going somewhere.
There are tons of algorithms from academia like DBSCAN, BFGS and so on that are fairly complex to implement by yourself. It would take days to translate papers on these subjects to get usable algorithms - if you have enough background and skills, of course. Even then you would miss out on all the improvements that subsequent papers have brought out. In nutshell, to get to the state of art for cutting edge algorithms is extremely time and skills incentive. This website can solve this huge problem.<p>I think, as a startup, you might want to cut down on "making money" part and especially muddy waters of patents. These are likely not the greatest incentives either for researchers or consumers given that lot of grants don't allow this and even if it did many researchers settled in academia have severe repulsion to it. Instead try to grow the site organically keeping it as frictionless as possible for both sides of users. Motivate researchers to post code and data, for example, to allow them compete against state of the art. Be the <i>that</i> reputed site for computational problems and algorithms that people go to like they go to Stackoverflow for programming problems. Once you establish yourself like that, researchers want to get benchmark from you to cite in their papers and that's great motivation for them to give you their code. Consumers can then find them in your repository. I would suggest to keep making money as TBD. Just grow the site making it largest possible index of computational problems and known state of the art solutions.
I'd like to know how a startup still looking for a founding engineer...<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8120070" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8120070</a><p>...gets written up in WIRED. Nice PR work.
Not sure this has the utility that its creators envision. You're effectively putting the "CPU" on a REST interface and shuffling data across a very long bus to have it operated upon.<p>What kinds of algorithms is this even good for? Cryptographic algorithms are right out. The image on the page says "Dijkstra's shortest path planning algorithm" - I don't think that's a candidate. Results for pure functions can just be cached ...<p>The only possible beneficial (and profitable?) use I can imagine is to gather statistics on algorithm performance with real-world data provided by developers from around the 'tubes.
Either this was created by someone who had no CS experience or it was created by someone who is a developer but is equally clueless.<p>Algorithms are worthless by itself.
> Algorithmia will host the algorithms on multiple cloud service providers, such as Amazon and Rackspace, which will speed things up for customers who use those particular hosts<p>I've long wondered if this business model of <i>service components</i> is how industry will evolve. It seems to make economic sense - but so did ordinary <i>components</i>, and they lost to (free, modifiable) open source libraries.