Another Dubious Marketing Claim, Courtesy Of Erstwhile Commenter "Bob"

While we were yammering on about minor, meaningless press-release claims, faithful commenter "Bob" (likely not his real government name!) has pointed us to a much more important piece of longer-term Mattersight puffery:

". . .Of note, a Mattersight claim that I’ve found interesting, yet unchallenged, is the assertion they employ millions of unique algorithms. While they may have a number of algorithms that can be combined in various ways as to constitute millions of possible combinations, this would not change the fact that the core unique set of algorithms is much smaller. Think about the lottery, there are only like 55 unique numbers but there are 417 million combinations of 5 numbers. If MATR wants to suggest they have millions of unique algorithms, then I would question if they have ever had enough dollars in their bank account to have properly tested each one, let alone design and code. Nor, should they happen to have a computational and storage system of over a million physical or logical nodes (which I doubt), would the same algorithm running on multiple notes be considered separate or unique algorithms. . . ."

I quite agree. If Mr. Conway considers every addition, subtraction, multiplication, division or limiting variable to be a "unique algorithm" -- then he is essentially claiming he invented math. And we all know that is preposterous. Even "Cookie Monster KNOW this!!"

But when it is dressed up in pseudo-scientific jargon -- it sounds impressive, on first blush. So it goes, in Mr. Conway's little fiefdom (covered in the Emperor's New Robes), natch.