Marcus du Sautoy is taking us through some of his favourite algorithms! Enthusiastically! I am all for this. If anyone is to take me through their favourite algorithms, it does indeed need to be enthusiastically. As Du Sautoy is an Oxford professor of mathematics spliced with a labrador puppy, he is the perfect man for the job.
And so to last night’s documentary The Secret Rules of Modern Living (BBC4), about those strange little sets of calculations, so compact yet so powerful, that now form the unseen backdrop to so much of our lives.
From Euclid’s recipe for finding the greatest common divisor (demonstrated by aerial shots of Du Sautoy filling a floor with tiles) to sorting billions of packets of data (demonstrated by Du Sautoy swapping pairs of blocks until they stood in order of size) to the monstrous piece of search-ranking brilliance conceived by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in their Menlo Park garage back in the dim and distant age of 1998, Du Sautoy was delighted with it all.
The viewer likewise. For utter ignoramuses – your average TV reviewer, for example – there was enough there to give us a glimpse on a distant shimmering horizon of the beauty mathematicians see in their work and workings. And enough close-ups to give us – I suspect inadvertently – a much fuller sense of the horrors of an imminent automated world in which we are all just numbers crunched. Du Sautoy was enthralled by the algorithmic power on display at Ocado’s employee-free warehouse, and blithely claimed that research showed marriages between people who met through dating sites that used algorithms to match them lasted longer and were happier than people who meet in the traditional manner. I’d like to have a look at that research – and at a future in which humans are definitely not lining the streets with begging bowls as robots whizz past us delivering food to the people who own the robots and their computational software – before I become quite so enamoured.
Non-ignoramuses, if they watched, doubtless found it highly frustrating. But as with all these programmes, half the fun is in envisaging the younger viewer whose eye is caught and some sleeping part of his or her brain stirred and woken to think “Hmm, what’s that now …?” and an embryonic Lucasian professor starts to hatch.
Charlie Hebdo: Three Days that Shook Paris (More4) was a record of the darker side of human potential – a look at what happens when you put disaffection, religious fundamentalism and assorted other unknown forces into the whirring cogs of a psychical calculator that does not work according to logic or pure reason.
The documentary followed the unfolding of the three days in January this year of the worst terrorist attack in France for half a century. As Paris returned to work after the new year, the radicalised Kouachi brothers, Chérif and Saïd, armed themselves with Kalashnikovs, drove into the 11th arrondissement and killed 12 people in and around the offices of the French satirical magazine, including a Muslim police officer who chased them as they made their escape. During the three-day manhunt that followed, which tracked them down to a warehouse in Picardy and ended in a shoot-out initiated by them in the wake of their professed wish to die as martyrs, further attacks and murders were being carried out by their associate, Amedy Coulibaly, who threatened to kill all the hostages he was holding during a siege at a supermarket in Vincennes if the Kouachi brothers were harmed.
Charlie Hedbo’s medical columnist Dr Patrick Pelloux was late to the editorial meeting that the Kouachi brothers had fired upon. He thought his experience as an emergency doctor had prepared him for what he would find, but “C’etait carnage a l’interieur”. Outside, people’s phones recorded the shooting and death of policeman Ahmed Merabet. Footage shows him being given CPR but “Etait mort,” says his colleague Rocco Contento. “C’etait une tristesse absolue.”
It was a solid, unsensationalist piece of work that trusted in the power of its material. It chose to black out the moment of Merabet’s death but not Coulibaly’s, which I understand but does suggest a pandering to the instinct for vengeance and also that we damn the feelings of any family he left behind, as if they are automatically tainted by association.
The massacre gave a boost to the National Front as well as prompting an outpouring of support for the magazine, free speech and the victims’ families. Merabet’s brother, Malek, spoke to the crowd during the subsequent million-strong demonstration that filled the streets. “I now address all racists. You shouldn’t confuse extremists with Muslims. Mad people have no colour or religion. Devastated by this act of barbarism, we feel the pain of all the victims’ families.”
How little of anything that matters in our lives computes
This article was corrected on 25 September to correct the spelling of “divisor” and of Menlo Park.
