Customer Reviews

Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market, and Just About Everything Else

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

"Chance" by Amir Aczel is an entertaining introduction to statistical reasoning as applied to daily life. It will provide a great deal of information to those unfamiliar with statistics or statistical reasoning. However, because of the brevity of the explanations, the reader often does not have adequate information to evaluate the hypotheses put forward in the text. This is particularly the case in the section on selecting a mate, in which a number is given based on "e" without any real explanation, and the section on Bayes's theorem, which does not provide enough detail to allow for adequate understanding or evaluation. The book also has some factual errors, such as the presentation of a poker hand in which one player is trying to draw to a flush in order to "beat" another player who already has a full house. I also think that some of the problems presented at the end of the book were not explained clearly.

This book may be a good place to start for someone interested in the application of statistics to daily life but it will leave the interested reader thirsting for more details and explanation. If that was the goal of the author, he certainly succeeded. Perhaps he or other authors will write a book which addresses this need in the near future.

In "Chance," Dr. Aczel had a wonderful idea: Present the basic ideas of probability in a context that lay-people can understand. He engages the reader's imagination through real-life examples. Given the role that probability and statistics play in political reporting (through polls), the recent poker craze and investing, this book seems an ideal gift for just about anyone who doesn't already know anything about probability theory.

Unfortunately, the execution of the book is severely flawed. The book is very poorly edited. In particular, many of the formulas contain significant errors. A probability theory novice will certainly get lost in this.

In addition, in the section about 6 degrees of separation, he makes no mention of James Milgram's experiment. One can probably safely assume he is aware of this experiment, and I think that making no mention of it (especially as it brings sociology so nicely into the picture) was a mistake.

Finally, the book is simply too short. The real text is only about 120 pages, with a large font and small pages. I was originally considering giving this book to my Computer Algorithms students as a helpful introduction to probability. Dr. Aczel does not, however, provide enough formulas and examples to make this useful.

I highly recommend this book as a gift for those people who have never had a probability course. It will help acquaint them with some of the counter-intuitive effects that probability theory has on every-day life. Serious fans of math, however, should steer clear.

The basic ideas are clearly and cleverly presented. However, it is little more than a very short text with a few examples. It is distracting to find the equations clumsily presented, and there are errors of content in addition to typos. It needed a knowledgable and diligent editor.

Everyone knows that chance plays a huge role in our lives, in weather, auto accidents, and coincidental meetings, as well as in lotteries and other games. "What are the odds?" is a question we are faced with so many times a day that we probably don't even think about how many unconscious calculations we make trying to predict the future. Probability theory helps us do this; it is "humanity's attempt to use pure mathematics to understand the un-understandable." So writes Amir D. Aczel in _Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market, & Just About Everything Else_ (Thunder's Mouth Press). It is a book of mathematics, but it is not intimidating. It is accessible and small, readable in an evening (but readers may spend much more time working on the sample problems), and may present few surprises to those familiar with the subject. The presentation, however, is brisk and clear, and serves very well as a primer to this branch of mathematics.

The pretty red and white cover of the book simulates the back of a playing card, and games of chance are a big part of the subject. Not only do the games themselves get examined, but dice and cards give good examples of how probability may be calculated. But more complex life examples are given. As the title insists, probability theory can help you find love (or, for that matter, a good apartment or a companionable puppy). Let's say you are entering a computer dating service, and you expect as many as a hundred relationships, each of which you will experience and then keep that mate or move on. If you just stop at the first prospect, there is a one in a hundred chance that it is the best match for you; similarly, if you get through all 99, the hundredth prospect has a one in a hundred chance of being the best match for you. Neither of those odds is very good. The mathematically best strategy is to date the first 37 matches, and settle on none of them. This enables you to learn about what you are doing and how well the population measures up to what you want. And then, starting with the 38th one, take the candidate that is better than any so far. There's a chance you won't find any such candidate, because the best match was in the first 37 you sampled; but as firm as the mathematics is, nothing in love is certain. As Aczel jokes, "Now, don't you wish your mother would give you advice like that?"

There is gambling advice. If you wish to avoid losing money at the casinos, don't gamble. Don't make the mistake that if the die just rolled a two, it is less likely to roll a two next time; dice, or roulette wheels, or all the rest, have no memory. If you have to gamble, and you have a big wad of money to blow, play it all on one big play; if you apportion the money in a series of bets, the money will only be chipped away by the odds that always favor the house. You can get advice on shuffling; a deck riffle shuffled five times still has pockets of order, but seven times will produce randomness. But mostly, this smart little book shows how probability makes a difference in our lives and in the way we think about things. Here you will find the answer to the problem about whether those monkeys on typewriters would ever really produce _Hamlet_, why it always seems as if you get to the bus stop just after the bus has already gone rather than just before it comes, why good things seem to come in threes, and why you should expect in a room of 23 people that two of them ought to have the same birthday. It's an entertaining brief overview of a classic subject.

'Chance' by Amir Aczel is lucid in language. It covers the fundamentals of probability theory and relates the mathematics to interesting real-life scenarios. The explanation of Bayes' Theorem is especially good.

However, from the perspective of a lay reader, the book is confusing at some places. For example, in Ch. 2 it refers to 'outcome' and 'event' but the word 'outcome' is seldom, if ever, used in the rest of the book. The distinction between these two is not clear from the book. In Ch.7,it mentions that the feeling (that there should be equal number of heads and tails at any given point on tossing a fair coin) is 'indeed true- but only over the long term'. However, in Ch. 11, it mentions that 'as the number of trials (tosses of the coin) increases, the probability of an even split becomes smaller!'. These two statements are conflicting.

There seem to be some issue with printing the formulas on pp.48, 49. And, the book suddenly jumps into a discussion on probability distributions in Ch.17 without any explanation of what a distribution is about.

While the answer given for problem #22 is correct, the formula shown in the answer is wrong.

A book attempting to popularize and de-mystify the mathematics, I believe, should explain the apparent contradictions and misconceptions and stimulate the reader to go beyond the book. I do not think the book really stimulates any further reading.

Not withstanding these blemishes, the book is worth reading once, but is it worth keeping in a personal library? I am not sure.

This tiny book leaves one with the impression it was knocked off over a weekend. The topics chosen in the book are intriguing but are only mentioned in summary and nothing is dicussed in depth; most results are simply stated without adequate justification or proof. One feels like asking "where's the beef?".
Any interested novice or high school student curious about these selected topics will be most frustrated by the many errors and poor or misleading type-setting. Did this book have a proof-reader?
Errors or typos are on pages 48,49,96,97,115,116,128,129.
The Notices of the American Mathematics Society, August 2005 issue, reviewed this book but Professor Durrett, the reviewer, was far too kind. He did criticize the cost per character and concluded that the book was no bargain but he never mentioned the errors.
In conclusion, this is a hastily written book which needed far more "meat" as well as a proof-reader. Get it from the local library if you must but don't waste your money buying it.
Gill Valk

Very fun book, but had me wanting a lot more. One thing that was nice, was that it was so short, it made me feel a lot smarter than I am when I finished it in half a day.

Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market and Just About Everything Else
by Amir D. Aczel

This is a good basic intro to probability. It is accessible but it does have some equations in it. It gives the reader some concrete examples like the birthday problem that allow them to understand important concepts like random distributions. Probability and random events play a huge part in people's lives. This book can help people only slightly familiar with these concepts to get a better grasp of them. Do not put too much stock in the title it will not help you much with any of that.

Surely, this book about propability is written for the
layman. But even if you are little more expert than that,
it is quite good. I certainly enjoyed walking through memory lane
in theory that I once learned in a probability course at
University.
The examples are many - and very thought provoking. From
time to time the theory is only touched upon lightly - but no
problem - Wikipedia.org (or other internet sites) might help
you with the finer details of e.g. Bayes theorem,
the secretary problem or what ever you might
want more details on.
And isn't it nice to know that you will have a
0.0005 chance of dying in a car accident if you live
5 years in France, or a 0.9999984 chance of surviving
20 flights this year. Or if 10 people gather in a
room there is a 12 % chance of a birthday match. With 23
people in the room there is 50 % chance of match.

You can't live without that kind of data!

-Simon

This book covers alot of ground in discussing topics in probability without becoming too technical. The book is succinct, easy to read, and seems that is was meant to pique one's curiosity in probabilities teaching some interesting principles and ideas. These ideas could be further expanded with more of a specialized and more technical probability textbook.