What’s not to like about the idea of central European folk dance being used as a means of illustrating the operation of different sorting algorithms? That’s what the Algo-rythmics did a few years ago – my personal favourite has to be the Quick Sort (below) with the hats changing with the operands, but do check them out (all six are on their Youtube page).
Within the last ten days, we’ve been reminded about the invisibility of algorithms which govern much of our online activity. We’ve seen Google alter its search ranking algorithm to prioritise mobile-friendly sites in its search results, Facebook change its newsfeed algorithm to give greater precedence to posts from friends (who’d have thought it?!), and the French Senate vote to require search engines to reveal the workings of their search ranking algorithms to ensure they deliver fair and non-discriminatory results. There’s also been discussion of the role of trading algorithms in the 2010 ‘flash crash’ and stock market movements in the last month or so in the US …
