Hacking the Humanities

One student, Henry, a double major in computer science and mathematics, approached the assignment differently. Rather than trying to imitate Pliny himself, he found a text version of “The Natural History” on the Internet, analyzed its thirty-seven books using a natural-language processing toolkit, and then wrote a computer algorithm that generated English sentences using the discovered features of Pliny’s style. Here’s a sample from the passage that he submitted:

.. As the stakes have grown, so has an expectation about the role that the “digital turn” might play in revivifying the humanities, effecting a synthesis with the sciences, and other weighty causes.

Why do so many CS graduates flunk simple interview questions in algorithms?

And whilst I was brilliant with all thealgorithms under the sun 8 years ago, right now I can barely and vaguely remember them but you know what? I don’t need to. Most of them are implemented and ready to use in free, open-source libraries. I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Sorting and any other operations on data structures are all ready to go – I just need to know which one to apply. I need to know their prosand cons (which I do, for the stuff I actually ever use). I don’t need to know the exact implementation of it (or to be able to do it myself). On the rare occasions when I do need something more sophisticated I don’t need to be able to come up with these things on the spot, within 30-45min slot of an interview. There is this brilliant thing called Google and Wikipedia.

.. And maybe where you are this stuff actually does get used daily. Maybe you didn’t forget because of that. Maybe you do work so low-level with algorithms and continuously re-evaluating their space and time complexity that it feels like it’s obvious and basic. But if that’s the case then even more, I *personally* wouldn’t want to work in such a place. It seems boring as hell. To me the fun is much higher level of abstraction, and it comes more from solving real-life problems for real people – and from my experience so far, algorithms are hardly ever the most difficult part of the solution.