Are Algorithms the Magic Bullet?

In a word, maybe. I think algorithms is like the treasure map ... the way to get your insight , idea, solution done. Everybody, everyday, everywhere have ideas, good and bad ones, brilliant and stupids ... but what makes the difference between what will works, make money and more important, get done, is the way you implement your idea. I have a personal notebook with dozens of insights but i have no idea how to implement most of then ... so what´s the point on having just the brilliant idea ? But when you have an good idea and then write a good algorithm, you can get your idea very close from reality and that´s the most important thing. So maybe, yes, the algorithms is kinda kings in a world where "get something useful done" is extremely urgent.

In a word, no. The netflix effort was many, many man-months of inspired work. And as Norvig points out in a recent paper, "simple models and a lot of data trump more elaborate models based on less data. ..."

i'm not 100% convinced this author has any idea what an 'algorithm' is.<p><i>Algorithms are simply one way of executing on insight, a way that is particularly well suited to large data sets, no doubt.</i><p>huh