Secret Rules of Modern Living: Algorithms

In this coding special, Professor Marcus du Sautoy lifts the veil on The Secret Rules of Modern Living: Algorithms.

Our lives are touched by Algorithms every day. They are ubiquitous - yet most of us are unaware of their extraordinary impact on our everyday lives.

Algorithms control what we read, the products we buy, and with whom we socialize. They know when to stock supermarket shelves, can predict the weather, and create connections around the planet at the speed of light. Algorithms can guide a surgeons hand, build works of art, and even ignite the spark of love.

To make the point that algorithms are not a modern phenomenon, we’re looking into the historical example of Euclid’s Algorithm from two and half thousand years ago. It was used to work out common divisors in mathematical problems. A practical application is when tiling a floor you need to work out how many tiles you need to cover a surface.

Algorithms such as QuickSort, PageRank and Simplex enhance our capabilities because they make life easier and faster, they do the dirty, boring work for us. It is the brilliant minds behind the algorithms we ought to celebrate.

The first written algorithm was the creation of the Greek scholar Euclid but the modern godfather of algorithms could only be Alan Turing.

One area where algorithms have excelled and surpassed the human mind is in the world of streamlining and organizing complex systems with huge amounts of data in the blink of an eye.

Clearly the real expansion in the use of algorithms has coincided with the computer age and the collation of big data. It’s the modern application of algorithms to solve problems that make up the majority of the program. We focus in on the most interesting and surprising examples which represent different categories of algorithms. For example, the ground movement of airplanes at Heathrow airport is coordinated using a Scheduling algorithm. A kidney donor exchange scheme uses a Matching algorithm. There is a $1m prize offered by a mathematical society in the US for the best Routing algorithm called The Traveling Salesman Problem. Every big delivery company and sales team has their own solution to maximize efficiency – but which is the best? Marcus will explore how math is being used to solve these real world problems and, in the case of the kidney donors, even making life and death decisions.