Status
Call number
Collection
Publication
Description
A fascinating exploration of how insights from computer algorithms can be applied to our everyday lives, helping to solve common decision-making problems and illuminate the workings of the human mind. All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such issues for decades. And the solutions they've found have much to teach us. In a dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, acclaimed author Brian Christian and cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths show how the algorithms used by computers can also untangle very human questions. They explain how to have better hunches and when to leave things to chance, how to deal with overwhelming choices and how best to connect with others. From finding a spouse to finding a parking spot, from organizing one's inbox to understanding the workings of memory, Algorithms to Live By transforms the wisdom of computer science into strategies for human living.--From dust jacket.… (more)
User reviews
And that's what this book is about: algorithms of the kind computers use, and their applications in the real world. Which, I admit, sounds dull. I suppose to most people, it may be dull. But, giant nerd that I am, I found it fascinating. Intellectually exciting, even. How amazing is it that a very small change in the requirements of a problem can alter the task of finding the best solution from a simple to an impossible one... or that, by going back to the simpler version of the problem and working from there, you can often come very, very close to that best solution, anyway? This book is full of things like that that made me go wow, from the notion that introducing randomness into calculations about non-random things can actually give better results, to guidelines on how to make the best possible guesses based on completely insufficient data, to the welcome confirmation that I'm already intuitively using the optimal methods for alphabetizing my bookshelves.
It's all wonderfully well-written, too: beautifully comprehensible and full of excellent examples. There's also, for my mind, exactly the right amount of math, as the authors talk us through careful mathematical thinking without ever getting bogged down in equations. Or computer code, for that matter. It's all just nice, clear, readable English.
Am I going to go out now and apply the algorithms discussed here towards improving my own life? Well... maybe. Did I come away from it feeling like I understand the world better? I think so. Did I come away feeling I understand more about the tools we have for understanding the world? Absolutely. I also may have come away regretting more than ever that I didn't major in computer science, because it really did just light up all kinds of nerdy areas in my brain.
At the same time, I hesitate to recommend the book broadly because it was such a perfect book for me that I have to assume it would be less perfect for almost anyone
Briefly, "Algorithms to Live By" presents a series of well-known computer algorithms and explains how they are used to solve common problems in computer science. Then it takes each algorithm and applies it to real-world problems, discussing whether or not we, as human beings, approximate the algorithm's behavior with our own actions.
This may make the book sound incredibly dry, like the authors are trying to turn people into computers and squelch out all humanity. Instead, the authors are taking an algorithmic look the human condition. (E.g., how does the explore/exploit trade-off explain why there are certain times in our lives when it's easier or harder for us to make new friends? Can the concept of intractability free us from worrying about making perfect choices?)
If you have a strong background in computer science, you probably won't learn anything new from the algorithms presented in this book, although you may still be interested in some of the real-world applications of those algorithms. However, if you have little background in computer science, but an interest in algorithms and a patience for technical prose—seriously, this is the kind of book where you have to stop and think for a minute between each paragraph—this is the book for you.
You may even find that this book significantly changes the way you approach some aspects of your life, or at least helps you better understand why you behave the way you do.
Those with a heavy behavioral science background will find little surprising in those portions of the book, but the concepts and models presented will be things you start seeing everywhere, so they are a great way to reorganize this material and see it afresh.
In describing various aspects of this book to my spouse, who studied a great deal of computer science in his undergraduate work, he exclaimed that the book sounded like it highlighted many key computer science notions. Indeed, we mused whether it might help nontechnical people get some insight into how technical people think, in a "CS appreciation" kind of vein. Certainly anything that can help to bridge that gap could have value in an increasingly technical world.
The book includes no (programming) code and very few mathematical expressions in the main text. Instead, it discusses relatively concrete scenarios and logical thinking, so it should be accessible to college-educated adults. Further details are given in the end notes and references, for those who may want to explore one of the topics more deeply.
You might like this book if you like Steven Johnson, Daniel Levitin, Scott Page, or Peter Pirolli.
The authors attempt to take the highly specialized world of algorithms, explain them in common terms the college educated should track with, then relate them
In the end I found I really enjoyed reading this book when I took a single chapter at a time, and just focused on the front half of the chapter explaining common algorithms in depth. I fast forwarded through some bits to keep from getting frustrated. so in summary: Best consumed in short bursts.
Decisions, while part and parcel of the human condition, are increasingly being foisted onto computers. In order to accomplish this, the complexity of the decision must be manipulated to allow the machine to come to a "good' decision however "good" has been
It's a good book and I learned a great deal about computers processes. And I did learn a number of interesting insights into human decision making. What I did not appreciate with the book was a subtle implied superiority of computers versus humans. I supposed I shouldn't be surprised as both authors are heavily involved in the artifical intelligence community but I am of the mind that the loss of data required in reversion to the mean/median can often entail the loss of the most interesting data. Plus the restricting of inputs/options which the authors labeled as a computational 'kindness' can be anything but (why does the US presidental election come to mind here?). So while I can most definitely recommend this book to just about anyone it is a recomendation that comes with reservations.
1. It really was above my pay-grade, though momentarily I always felt it made
2. Christian is either a really boring reader (lecturer?), or the producer of the book did a very poor job on the speed of the recording. I had to speed it up to 1.25% to save my sanity. The voice suppression was a bit distorted, but better than listening to the slo-mo.
Amazing in that it will help you, as long as you possess a bit of intellectual curiosity, to live a happier, more productive life!
Unusual, in that it explores this self-help space from the perspective of computer science!
What the heck does computer
The book's focus is on human decision making: make better decisions, live happier, more productive lives. Simple.
But, how do you make better decisions? Not quite so simple, as there is a lot known and a bit to learn. But, if you are intellectually curious, the learning will be fun, and rewarding. And, you can do it in small steps. No need to digest the entire book before beginning to benefit from it.
So, what is an algorithm? In computer science an algorithm is nothing more than a recipe: a series of steps for a computer to follow to obtain (compute) a desired result.
The genius of this book is that it eliminates the series of steps, and the computer!
If all this sounds perplexing, perhaps an example will help. The first chapter discusses a kind of question we all face: when do I stop looking? When do I stop looking for a better job candidate and hire someone? When do I stop looking for a better parking place, and park? When do I stop looking for a better offer, and sell my house? When do I stop dating and choose a life partner? The answer, sometimes, is after you have evaluated 37% of the possibilities. Add conditions and constraints, many of which are discussed in Chapter 1, and the answer can vary.
This book contains an awful lot of information, and it will take some time to work your way through it the first time. And once won't be enough. You'll want to return to it again, and again, as new life decisions demand careful consideration. Each chapter deals with a kind of decision. As noted, Chapter 1 discusses optimal stopping rules. Chapter 2 discusses when to explore (e.g., try a new restaurant), and when to exploit (go to one you know well). Other chapters deal with: sorting (organizing), caching (what to keep handy), scheduling (what to do first, or last), Bayes rule (how to use data to make a decision), overfitting (when to use less data), relaxation (when to ignore constraints), randomness (when to give chance a say), networking (connecting with others), and game theory (getting into other people's heads).
The book concludes with a call for computational kindness: try to make it easy for others to make decisions.
The more than 50 pages of end notes are an integral part of the book and must not be ignored. Some notes elaborate on the text. Others provide cultural information, or define terms. A few provide computational or technical detail. But, most notes cite references. My one criticism, constructive I hope, would be for the authors to make it much easier for the reader to find the elaborations, definitions, cultural information, and technical information, perhaps by judicious use of footnotes and a glossary, leaving the references to the end notes.
This is a terrific book. It is most highly recommended!
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
It may sound like hyperbole, but the chapters on optimal stopping and
The most impactful concepts are clustered in the front of the book, which is again optimal for those readers with short attention spans. The stuff later in the book is also very enlightening, just not as universally applicable as optimal stopping or explore/exploit.
This is not a book designed for people with an advanced understanding of math or computer science. It's designed as a gateway to bring in people like me who are interested in these fields, but are perhaps a little intimidated.
Read it now, people.
I knew some of the concepts that the
I believe this book is mostly for Science and Mathematics enthusiasts. A casual reader might get lost in the deep computer- and statistics-theories provided throughout the book. Being one such person, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.
It seems at the face of it very simplistic, and my thesis from a quick read is that it suffers from a fundamental fallacy. Computers are immortal, and don't suffer existential problems where if they make a bad decision they don't get to make
You won't learn any math, programming or even pseudo-coding from "Algorithms to live by", but it will give most readers a broad range of examples of how computer science is not just about computers, but the study of complexity and how to do decision making using rules (which may be automated).
Some of Computer Science that is. This is where the murkiness comes in because it also investigates many other things. Some Computer Scientists work on logic, and as yet whether logic is normative or descriptive is one of those big questions that is currently left to philosophy. What about Programming Language design? Well, formal work in this area does involve proving theorems, but about human artefacts. We can further cloud the picture with inter-disciplinary work. Computer Science used to discover how fish coordinate their behavior, for example.
But, removing the mud, we have left theoretical Computer Science and that is really the easiest thing to defend as Science. By which I mean, decidability, complexity, etc. I have already pointed out this says something about the universe, I think the main attack would be "how can saying something about computers be saying anything about nature when they are human-made artefacts?". The thing is, we are really talking about computation and not computers, computation is of course a human concept but it conceptualizes something real in nature. We can make other conceptualisations of course, but so long as there is a morphism between them and nature, anything we say about them is also said about the universe around us.
I really liked the ideas about how our seemingly irrational behaviors are often
My one critique was the section about pecking orders and dominance hierarchies, while yes there are observations in the natural world, and that can be related to sorting, making arguments that hierarchies are "scientifically" better or more peaceful is strongly akin to past scientific rationalization that have been used for centuries to justify racism, sexism, etc. It is better to just not go down that road.
Language
Original publication date
ISBN
DDC/MDS
153.43 |