An algorithm must be seen to be believed.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of visualization in understanding algorithms.
Donald Knuth's quote highlights that algorithms are often complex and abstract concepts that can be difficult to grasp without visual representation. He suggests that seeing the workings of an algorithm, perhaps through diagrams or visualizations, makes it easier for people to understand and appreciate the underlying processes involved.
In practice
During a tech presentation, I used Knuth's quote to highlight the importance of diagrams in explaining complex algorithms.
Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.
The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. A huge gap exists between what we know is possible with today's machines and what we have so far been able to finish.
The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.
People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas and that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!
Social media has allowed groups, such as ISIL, to use the Internet to spot and assess potential recruits. With the widespread horizontal distribution of social media, terrorists can identify vulnerable individuals of all ages in the United States - spot, assess, recruit, and radicalize - either to travel or to conduct a homeland attack.
The rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere.
Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died.
There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'.
We want to build systems that can generalize to a new task. Being able to do things with much less data and with much less computation is going to be interesting and important.
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