This discussion started innocently enough, but quickly became one of those chin-stroking affairs that appear in reddit comments every now and then, warming my heart:
> the concept of an algorithmCopying and pasting the response here wouldn't really do it justice. See it in context. Careful, you're about to become smarter.
posted by
alexis [kn0thing]
at
23:37
Labels: geektastic, making people smarter, math is fun, reddit
this is the personal blog of Alexis [kn0thing] Ohanian, so I won't clutter our reddit dev blog. I started reddit with Steve Huffman back in June 05 and also happen to be responsible for the site's alien mascot (pictured above).
This blog used to be a glimpse into web 2.0 startup life, but now that we've sold out, it's an assortment of design/startup/geek-related things.
Really? Do you know of an Arabic or Indian algorithm that pre-dates Euclid's (Greek, of course) algorithm for computing greatest common divisors? That's from about 300 BC and I was always taught that this was the first known example of an algorithm found in history. I'd be very interested to hear if this is not actually the case.