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Re:Critique: "Programming Collective Intelligence" by j2d2 on Wednesday June 04, 2008 @11:41AM (#209017)
Can you elaborate on the things it simply gets wrong?
Re:Critique: "Programming Collective Intelligence" by brent on Wednesday June 04, 2008 @08:29PM (#209522)
One example, simply because I opened the book to this page after reading your comment and happen to know a bit about the subject (p49):

"[t]he algorithm takes the difference between every pair of items and tries to make a chart in which the distances between the items match those differences"

This is referring to multidimensional scaling which is a large family of techniques, some of which attempt to achieve this goal (delta ~= d), but not necessarily. Granted, in this case the algorithm presented DOES attempt to do this. BUT, the algorithm presented is not "multidimensional scaling". It is an implementation (not even a good one) attempting to minimize one of many possible objective functions.

I noticed several more when I flipped through it initially, but this is the type of thing I'm referring to.