Nine revolutionary algorithms that power our computers and smartphonesEvery day, we use our computers to perform remarkable feats. A simple web search picks out a handful of relevant needles from the world's biggest haystack: the billions of pages on the World Wide Web. Uploading a photo to Facebook transmits millions of pieces of information over numerous error-prone network links, yet somehow a perfect copy of the photo arrives intact. Without even knowing it, we use public-key cryptography to transmit secret information like credit card numbers; and we use digital signatures to verify the identity of the websites we visit. How do our computers perform these tasks with such ease?This is the first book to answer that question in language anyone can understand, revealing the extraordinary ideas that power our PCs, laptops, and smartphones. Using vivid examples, John MacCormick explains the fundamental "tricks" behind nine types of computer algorithms, including artificial intelligence (where we learn about the "nearest neighbor trick" and "twenty questions trick"), Google's famous PageRank algorithm (which uses the "random surfer trick"), data compression, error correction, and much more.These revolutionary algorithms have changed our world: this book unlocks their secrets, and lays bare the incredible ideas that our computers use every day.

Foreword ixChapter 1. Introduction: What Are the Extraordinary Ideas Computers Use Every Day? 1Chapter 2. Search Engine Indexing: Finding Needles in the World's Biggest Haystack 10Chapter 3. PageRank: The Technology That Launched Google 24Chapter 4. Public Key Cryptography: Sending Secrets on a Postcard 38Chapter 5. Error-Correcting Codes: Mistakes That Fix Themselves 60Chapter 6. Pattern Recognition: Learning from Experience 80Chapter 7. Data Compression: Something for Nothing 105Chapter 8. Databases: The Quest for Consistency 122Chapter 9. Digital Signatures: Who Really Wrote This Software? 149Chapter 10. What Is Computable? 174Chapter 11. Conclusion: More Genius at Your Fingertips? 199Acknowledgments 205Sources and Further Reading 207Index 211