Of all the suggestions, I like the "Malgorithms" the most. It is catchy, easy to read and probably understandable by normal people as well.

Yeah, it's definitely the most sellable one I've seen.

I don't like the implication that it's the algorithm that's malicious rather than the person who wrote the algorithm (no algorithm is inherently malevolent or benevolent in my opinion, it's just an algorithm), but I also know this distinction is completely pointless for the vast majority of people and "malgorithm" gets the gist of what people are getting at across very well.

While "malevolent"/"malicious" definitely has a "wicked" connotation, you also see it in words like "maladapted" or "malodorous" which are just "bad" without the "wickedness".

That's still dumping a "bad" on the poor old algorithm though, which has done nothing wrong simply by existing and doing what it is programmed to do. Algorithms aren't bad, it's the programmers who write them and the managers who decide they should be written who are bad when things like this happen.

I don't see how you could believe this point, unless you think things like "There's no bad music, only bad musicians" as well.

Perhaps an elucidating counterpoint is an algorithm written in such a manner that it is deliberately worthless, as a joke (e.g., StackSort, Bogosort). Obviously they're not the result of a bad programmer, they're just an inherently bad algorithm.

>unless you think things like "There's no bad music, only bad musicians" as well.

I actually do though, and I say that as a musician myself. These things are inherently subjective, writing good music isn't just a matter of how closely the musician adheres to a pre-determined set of rules. The qualities of goodness and badness exist in the minds of the creators and the audience rather than being attached to the music itself in some sense. Any attempt to classify "good" versus "bad" music in the sense people usually understand it is just an appeal to authority fallacy, the only thing that makes music good is "do I personally enjoy listening to it or not?". You can try to classify music based on how closely it fits a genre's set of rules but this quickly breaks down into absurdity in practice (for example, acts like the Grateful Dead which span many genres).

Are there bad smells?

Not really, the fox crap that smells awful to me smells wonderful to a golden retriever. The "badness" of the smell is entirely down to the nose that's smelling it, the subjective experience of smelling comes from the mind rather than the particular chemical compounds which we understand as a smell.

That subjective information which describes the badness of a smell doesn't exist within the smell itself, it exists within the mind.

Interestingly, "mal" in french means "bad". In latin, "malum" means "that leads to something wrong".

So "Malgorithms" it an accurate one.

That's just it though. Part of the definition of "algorithm" is "correct" and these things are all just ML output that generate correlated noise.

Hmm? I don't think an algorithm has to give "correct" answers, it just has to be precisely defined. For example, one could say "For this problem, a greedy algorithm yields decent but suboptimal answers."

Merriam-Webster online says: "a procedure for solving a mathematical problem (as of finding the greatest common divisor) in a finite number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation" and "broadly : a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end".

Algorithms solve problems. Wrong answers are not solutions to (i.e. do not solve) a given problem. Hence, algorithm implies that it provides correct answers within the parameters of the problem.

> Hence, algorithm implies that it provides correct answers within the parameters of the problem.

And so they always do. The problem that an algorithm solves is defined by the algorithm itself. The purpose of a system is what it does[0].

Algorithms are useful to solve problems for us - the trick is always in making sure that the problem the algorithm solves is the one we want.

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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

That's a bingo.

Disagree. We see this phenomena all the time: Right solution, bad input data. Right solution, wrong problem. Worlds turned to grey goo by replicators working to some technically correct algorithm.

These will never give the right solution, only something close.

The definition of algorithm is wider than you think. As your parent poster noted, "greedy algorithms" exist (as do many other algorithms which provide suboptimal answers). You can easily verify this by googling.

I love malgorithms having been exposed to the malicious grift of the healthcare industry.

If you coined this it's great!