recommendation algorithms

A JSConf 2014 talk visually breaking down algorithms behind everyday UI patterns, such as dropdown menus that vanish when the mouse drifts and picking the nearest target to the cursor. It shows how these are implemented in JavaScript.

A visualization and sonification of 15 sorting algorithms, from selection sort to bogo sort, run on shuffled integers in six minutes. Each algorithm gets a size and speed scaled to its complexity.

A Technology Connections video essay arguing that algorithmic feeds make people passive about finding content, leading to complacency in how they seek information. It urges people to actively choose what they consume.

Glenn Vanderburg presents Cló, a Clojure library that reimplements TeX's core typesetting algorithms as composable functions. He shows what translating procedural, literate-programming code into functional form teaches.

Andrei Alexandrescu's CppCon 2019 talk revisits sorting, showing how branchless tricks, hybrid strategies and a cost metric can speed up std::sort-style algorithms on modern hardware.

Tom Scott-style absurdist tour by Tom7 of SIGBOVIK chess projects: a tournament of 30 weird chess algorithms used to rate a color- and piece-blind chess program. Topics include mirrors, arithmetic encoding, perverted game tree search and a diluted Stockfish.

Tom Scott's Royal Institution discourse on science communication in the age of social media, how recommendation algorithms shape popularity, and why view counts can matter more than truth. It includes a segment on parasocial relationships.

Lex Fridman interviews Donald Knuth about algorithms, complexity, The Art of Computer Programming, and his work habits. The conversation covers his approach to verifying algorithms and how he organises his time.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2014 talk on writing fast C++, explaining why data structure choice and memory layout matter more than clever algorithms. It covers why standard containers like unordered_map perform poorly on modern CPUs.

Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci argues that the machine-learning systems used to serve ads also decide what political and social information people see. She explains how opaque algorithms can nudge, segment and manipulate users, and warns that the real danger is powerful people using AI to control populations.

Moleman 2 is a feature-length documentary about the demoscene, tracing its rise from 1980s Commodore 64 culture to modern real-time art. It explains the algorithms and creative process behind demos and intros.

Guy Steele presents a small geometric problem and compares four computational approaches: a classic sequential solution and three parallel-friendly ones. Each is illustrated pictorially and with working code, weighing total work against time to solution.

Sean Parent's GoingNative 2013 talk surveys new and overlooked C++ features and shows how to use them for simple, correct, clear code. It stresses using standard algorithms rather than raw loops.

Part 1 of Smarter Every Day's three-part series on manipulating the YouTube algorithm. It features Renee DiResta and examples of how social media platforms can be manipulated.

Hungarian folk dancers from Sapientia University act out the quicksort algorithm step by step, with music. It is part of the AlgoRythmics series of sorting algorithms performed as dance.

Psychologist Robert Epstein presents a Stanford EE380 colloquium on how internet algorithms such as search rankings can manipulate opinions, purchases and votes at massive scale. He also describes a new monitoring system for tracking such influence.

A restored 1994 video of Karl Sims' research on evolved virtual creatures, where simulated block creatures are bred through artificial evolution to swim, walk, follow and compete. It is a landmark demonstration of genetic algorithms in physics simulation.

Lukas Eder's Devoxx talk on how modern cost-based SQL optimizers rewrite and plan queries in ways developers would not expect. It argues that declarative SQL, used well, can run complex queries very fast.

A Channel 4 News interview with technologist Jaron Lanier, who argues that social media damages people's lives. He discusses how Facebook, YouTube and Google use algorithms and data collection to shape what users see.

A three-minute capture of SORTDEMO.BAS, the sorting visualization that shipped with QBasic. It animates insertion, bubble, heap, exchange, shell and quick sort with chiptune-like sound.

Writer and artist James Bridle shows how strange and disturbing children's videos on YouTube, from surprise eggs to algorithmic mashups, are produced for ad revenue. He argues they reveal problems in a data-driven internet.

In a TEDGlobal talk, Raffaello D'Andrea demonstrates quadcopters that play catch, balance, learn and coordinate, using algorithms that treat them like athletes. It includes Kinect-controlled quads.

SethBling shows MarI/O, a program using neural networks and the NEAT genetic algorithm to learn to play Super Mario World. The description links the source code, the paper and background reading.

Reducible's visual walkthrough of the Fast Fourier Transform, motivated by polynomial multiplication. It shows how the FFT's key ideas can be discovered by asking the right questions.

Erik Demaine's MIT 6.006 lecture introducing dynamic programming through Fibonacci numbers and shortest paths. It covers memoization, subproblems and optimal substructure.

Martin Donald explains the Wave Function Collapse algorithm using Sudoku-like constraint solving and shows how he implemented it with Blender and Godot. It links demos and reference articles.

Bryan Cantrill presents the ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache) paper by Megiddo and Modha at Papers We Love. He opens with a survey of caching strategies before digging into the self-tuning LRU/MFU design.

Eli Pariser's TED talk argues that personalized web services trap users in filter bubbles, limiting exposure to challenging information. He says this is bad for individuals and for democracy.

Peter Shor tells the story of how he discovered Shor's Algorithm, from his early mathematics days to the quantum factoring breakthrough. It was recorded at MIT at the Physics of Computation conference.

Karl Sims's 1994 demonstration of evolved virtual creatures: block-bodied creatures whose bodies and controllers are evolved through selection, mutation and recombination to swim, walk and compete.

Jon Bentley walks through three implementations of Hoare's Quicksort, from a dozen-line C function to a series of systematic code transformations that make the program ever simpler and more powerful. It is a Google Tech Talk on code elegance and program derivation.

A family video in which kids write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a parent follows them exactly as written, with comic results. It demonstrates how precise instructions must be.

Veritasium's Derek Muller explains his hypothesis that YouTube's algorithm, not viewer preference, drives views, and that click-through rate has become the key metric. He argues this pushes creators toward clickable titles and thumbnails and leads to burnout.

Edward Kmett's 2013 talk at Prezi in Budapest on succinct data structures, which store data in close to the information-theoretic minimum space while supporting fast queries. It ties together the research and walks through his Haskell succinct library.

Matt Parker follows the community effort to speed up his slow Wordle-solving code, which ended up running hundreds of millions of times faster. He walks through the techniques contributors used.

A short comedic complaint by ProZD about YouTube search failing to surface his own video even when searching its exact title. It illustrates how poor search results have become.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk introducing Polyworld, an artificial life simulator used to evolve artificial intelligence by designing worlds rather than minds. It presents results from ongoing attempts to evolve intelligent behavior.

An ETH Zurich lab demonstration of a failsafe algorithm that lets a quadrocopter detect the loss of a propeller and recover, returning to its original position.

A one-minute clip from Barack Obama's 2008 Google visit in which Eric Schmidt asks him the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers. Obama answers that bubble sort would be the wrong choice.

A short CGP Grey bonus video explaining the shortest-splitline algorithm, which draws electoral districts by repeatedly splitting a state along its shortest dividing line while balancing population. It is offered as a neutral, algorithmic fix for gerrymandering.