Well will you look at that?
A computer algorithm, a set of computational mathematical sequences to reach an answer, had been given a seat on the board of directors to a company, I kid you not!
This is one little thing that I kind of expected at some point but not quite like this. I do wonder lately that the era of Artificial Intelligence and Robots wool be upon us possibly sooner than I thought.
Now when your programming, or coding if you prefer, an algorithm is a grouped together set of mathematical equations. Well I say mathematical but desire this being true in the basic sense it can be doing all kinds of things. An algorithm, the term is used too loosely, can be very simple with just an equation or two or a seemingly endless number.
Each sequence is started and if that depends on another solution from another mathematical equation another sequence is started within that sequence. So it looks like a block of code within a whole long list of code. Each sequence may be started off by a character, '{' is common to start while '}' is common to end, and an algorithm must have as many characters to end add it does to start, thereby making it stand alone, ergo an algorithm.
Of course there is more to it than that and missing a curly bracket is a common mistake when you start to learn to code. An algorithm can do one thing that a part if the brain can do. Processors get faster all the time meaning that they can compute more algorithms in a given time.
Now the human brain is incredibly complex and it's been the holy grail of computer scientists like myself to imitate a human using processors and algorithms. So the amount of code needed to do this is incredibly long! I remember first hearing some years ago that a million lines of code exist in a computer game. God only knows what the number is today?! To even closely replicate a human being is an immense amount of data.
However it's not all that bad in reality as once it had been achieved in the first instance the beauty of having code is you do not have to write it all again. Or you can add improvements wait or change little oats if it to make it unique or just different.
In computer games and many gaming enthusiasts know this there are far less software houses creating the dimensional worlds than there are games software houses. This is due primarily to the fact that to save a great deal of time and money it would be easier and obviously cheaper to purchase the rights to use someone else's code. These are commonly known, or was, as game engines.
Years ago you had the people behind the game Epic, I think it was, who went on to create the Unreal games. ID Games who created Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake and a couple of others. Everything else used one of these game engines.
You can see the benefits, crap their is a term fit this they use and I have forgotten but think reusability, of this. The creators of the engine get another income after their initial sakes of their own games from others wishing to save time and money to create their own titles.
With this licensing of games is necessary to be a given before the creators works even bother I do not know. Or to put it another way if they do not get enough profit from their own to warrant the hard work I do not know.
The thing is that once upon a time a game reading the top ten would make ten million in profit, British Pounds I am talking here. Today it could be far, far higher but you cannot take that on face value. Because many millions of lines of code are involved in many different fields.
There is not just the game engine. There are the models, the animations, the pictures and textures used to be applied to the computer models which could be people, animals or objects. Then there is the sound, lighting effects, physics and if course artificial intelligence!
In other words one or two guys cannot do it any more! At least bit from scratch at any rate the time involved would be far too long.
Eventually you had a person for each thing within a game and this ended up with two guys for each and before you knew it you had a team! Each separate subject, though likely not all, would require a team on its own?!
So it becomes bigger and more complex all the time.
Then you have to wonder, as I sneakily head back to the subject matter, if the morons at the top that would dearly love to be in control of artificial intelligence thinking they can just get it to lie, cheat and con for them have seen enough movies of the drastic consequences of trying to attain this power?
Our indeed would the software engineers asked to do this seen enough if them too?!
Lastly an interesting retort concerning computers, algorithms and artificial intelligence and quite refreshing to see it without a single Google in sight!
Algorithm given seat on board http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27426942
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