Breaking down the Black Box

This is a bit of a re-blog of other people's work, but I think most people would find this interesting.  Below are some articles that I enjoyed because they take a complicated piece of software and break it down into understandable, bite-sized chunks.  Check these out by your leisure, but note that they're ordered by their inclusion of domain specific knowledge:

1. Siri
2. Dark Sky - Tells you when its going to rain.
3. Divvy - An app that tells you how to split a check with a group of friends.  The process of OCR is far more complicated than I had ever imagined.  Note: the diagrams used are 'state machines' or basically a graph of states with transitions (actions) to other states, and A* is an algorithm to find the best combination of choices given some function to estimate their proximity to some goal (ie: number closest to 0).