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Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions Hardcover – April 19, 2016
| Brian Christian (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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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.
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHenry Holt and Co.
- Publication dateApril 19, 2016
- Dimensions6.43 x 1.33 x 9.58 inches
- ISBN-101627790365
- ISBN-13978-1627790369
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A remarkable book... A solid, research-based book that’s applicable to real life. The algorithms the authors discuss are, in fact, more applicable to real-life problems than I’d have ever predicted.... It’s well worth the time to find a copy of Algorithms to Live By and dig deeper.”
―Forbes
“By the end of the book, I was convinced. Not because I endorse the idea of living like some hyper-rational Vulcan, but because computing algorithms could be a surprisingly useful way to embrace the messy compromises of real, non-Vulcan life.”
―The Guardian (UK)
“I absolutely reveled in this book... It's the perfect antidote to the argument you often hear from young math students: ‘What's the point? I'll never use this in real life!’... The whole business, whether it's the relative simplicity of the 37% rule or the mind-twisting possibilities of game theory, is both potentially practical and highly enjoyable as presented here. Recommended.”
―Popular Science (UK)
“An entertaining, intelligently presented book... Craftily programmed to build from one good idea to the next... The value of being aware of algorithmic thinking―of the thornier details of ‘human algorithm design,’ as Christian and Griffiths put it―is not just better problem solving, but also greater insight into the human mind. And who doesn’t want to know how we tick?”
―Kirkus Reviews
“Compelling and entertaining, Algorithms to Live By is packed with practical advice about how to use time, space, and effort more efficiently. And it’s a fascinating exploration of the workings of computer science and the human mind. Whether you want to optimize your to-do list, organize your closet, or understand human memory, this is a great read.”
―Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit
“In this remarkably lucid, fascinating, and compulsively readable book, Christian and Griffiths show how much we can learn from computers. We’ve all heard about the power of algorithms―but Algorithms to Live By actually explains, brilliantly, how they work, and how we can take advantage of them to make better decisions in our own lives.”
―Alison Gopnik, coauthor of The Scientist in the Crib
“I’ve been waiting for a book to come along that merges computational models with human psychology―and Christian and Griffiths have succeeded beyond all expectations. This is a wonderful book, written so that anyone can understand the computer science that runs our world―and more importantly, what it means to our lives.”
―David Eagleman, author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
About the Author
Tom Griffiths is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at UC Berkeley, where he directs the Computational Cognitive Science Lab. He has received widespread recognition for his scientific work, including awards from the American Psychological Association and the Sloan Foundation.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Algorithms to Live By
The Computer Science of Human Decisions
By Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths
Henry Holt and Company
All rights reserved.
Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Introduction,
Algorithms to Live By,
1 Optimal Stopping Optimal Stopping When to Stop Looking,
2 Explore/Exploit The Latest vs. the Greatest,
3 Sorting Making Order,
4 Caching Forget About It,
5 Scheduling First Things First,
6 Bayes's Rule Predicting the Future,
7 Overfitting When to Think Less,
8 Relaxation Let It Slide,
9 Randomness When to Leave It to Chance,
10 Networking How We Connect,
11 Game Theory The Minds of Others,
Conclusion,
Computational Kindness,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
Acknowledgments,
Also by Brian Christian,
About the Authors,
Copyright,
CHAPTER 1
Optimal Stopping
When to Stop Looking
Though all Christians start a wedding invitation by solemnly declaring their marriage is due to special Divine arrangement, I, as a philosopher, would like to talk in greater detail about this ... — JOHANNES KEPLER
If you prefer Mr. Martin to every other person; if you think him the most agreeable man you have ever been in company with, why should you hesitate? — JANE AUSTEN, EMMA
It's such a common phenomenon that college guidance counselors even have a slang term for it: the "turkey drop." High-school sweethearts come home for Thanksgiving of their freshman year of college and, four days later, return to campus single.
An angst-ridden Brian went to his own college guidance counselor his freshman year. His high-school girlfriend had gone to a different college several states away, and they struggled with the distance. They also struggled with a stranger and more philosophical question: how good a relationship did they have? They had no real benchmark of other relationships by which to judge it. Brian's counselor recognized theirs as a classic freshman-year dilemma, and was surprisingly nonchalant in her advice: "Gather data."
The nature of serial monogamy, writ large, is that its practitioners are confronted with a fundamental, unavoidable problem. When have you met enough people to know who your best match is? And what if acquiring the data costs you that very match? It seems the ultimate Catch-22 of the heart.
As we have seen, this Catch-22, this angsty freshman cri de coeur, is what mathematicians call an "optimal stopping" problem, and it may actually have an answer: 37%.
Of course, it all depends on the assumptions you're willing to make about love.
The Secretary Problem
In any optimal stopping problem, the crucial dilemma is not which option to pick, but how many options to even consider. These problems turn out to have implications not only for lovers and renters, but also for drivers, homeowners, burglars, and beyond.
The 37% Rule derives from optimal stopping's most famous puzzle, which has come to be known as the "secretary problem." Its setup is much like the apartment hunter's dilemma that we considered earlier. Imagine you're interviewing a set of applicants for a position as a secretary, and your goal is to maximize the chance of hiring the single best applicant in the pool. While you have no idea how to assign scores to individual applicants, you can easily judge which one you prefer. (A mathematician might say you have access only to the ordinal numbers — the relative ranks of the applicants compared to each other — but not to the cardinal numbers, their ratings on some kind of general scale.) You interview the applicants in random order, one at a time. You can decide to offer the job to an applicant at any point and they are guaranteed to accept, terminating the search. But if you pass over an applicant, deciding not to hire them, they are gone forever.
The secretary problem is widely considered to have made its first appearance in print — sans explicit mention of secretaries — in the February 1960 issue of Scientific American, as one of several puzzles posed in Martin Gardner's beloved column on recreational mathematics. But the origins of the problem are surprisingly mysterious. Our own initial search yielded little but speculation, before turning into unexpectedly physical detective work: a road trip down to the archive of Gardner's papers at Stanford, to haul out boxes of his midcentury correspondence. Reading paper correspondence is a bit like eavesdropping on someone who's on the phone: you're only hearing one side of the exchange, and must infer the other. In our case, we only had the replies to what was apparently Gardner's own search for the problem's origins fiftysome years ago. The more we read, the more tangled and unclear the story became.
Harvard mathematician Frederick Mosteller recalled hearing about the problem in 1955 from his colleague Andrew Gleason, who had heard about it from somebody else. Leo Moser wrote from the University of Alberta to say that he read about the problem in "some notes" by R. E. Gaskell of Boeing, who himself credited a colleague. Roger Pinkham of Rutgers wrote that he first heard of the problem in 1955 from Duke University mathematician J. Shoenfield, "and I believe he said that he had heard the problem from someone at Michigan."
"Someone at Michigan" was almost certainly someone named Merrill Flood. Though he is largely unheard of outside mathematics, Flood's influence on computer science is almost impossible to avoid. He's credited with popularizing the traveling salesman problem (which we discuss in more detail in chapter 8), devising the prisoner's dilemma (which we discuss in chapter 11), and even with possibly coining the term "software." It's Flood who made the first known discovery of the 37% Rule, in 1958, and he claims to have been considering the problem since 1949 — but he himself points back to several other mathematicians.
Suffice it to say that wherever it came from, the secretary problem proved to be a near-perfect mathematical puzzle: simple to explain, devilish to solve, succinct in its answer, and intriguing in its implications. As a result, it moved like wildfire through the mathematical circles of the 1950s, spreading by word of mouth, and thanks to Gardner's column in 1960 came to grip the imagination of the public at large. By the 1980s the problem and its variations had produced so much analysis that it had come to be discussed in papers as a subfield unto itself.
As for secretaries — it's charming to watch each culture put its own anthropological spin on formal systems. We think of chess, for instance, as medieval European in its imagery, but in fact its origins are in eighth-century India; it was heavy-handedly "Europeanized" in the fifteenth century, as its shahs became kings, its viziers turned to queens, and its elephants became bishops. Likewise, optimal stopping problems have had a number of incarnations, each reflecting the predominating concerns of its time. In the nineteenth century such problems were typified by baroque lotteries and by women choosing male suitors; in the early twentieth century by holidaying motorists searching for hotels and by male suitors choosing women; and in the paper-pushing, male-dominated mid-twentieth century, by male bosses choosing female assistants. The first explicit mention of it by name as the "secretary problem" appears to be in a 1964 paper, and somewhere along the way the name stuck.
Whence 37%?
In your search for a secretary, there are two ways you can fail: stopping early and stopping late. When you stop too early, you leave the best applicant undiscovered. When you stop too late, you hold out for a better applicant who doesn't exist. The optimal strategy will clearly require finding the right balance between the two, walking the tightrope between looking too much and not enough.
If your aim is finding the very best applicant, settling for nothing less, it's clear that as you go through the interview process you shouldn't even consider hiring somebody who isn't the best you've seen so far. However, simply being the best yet isn't enough for an offer; the very first applicant, for example, will of course be the best yet by definition. More generally, it stands to reason that the rate at which we encounter "best yet" applicants will go down as we proceed in our interviews. For instance, the second applicant has a 50/50 chance of being the best we've yet seen, but the fifth applicant only has a 1-in-5 chance of being the best so far, the sixth has a 1-in-6 chance, and so on. As a result, best-yet applicants will become steadily more impressive as the search continues (by definition, again, they're better than all those who came before) — but they will also become more and more infrequent.
Okay, so we know that taking the first best-yet applicant we encounter (a.k.a. the first applicant, period) is rash. If there are a hundred applicants, it also seems hasty to make an offer to the next one who's best-yet, just because she was better than the first. So how do we proceed?
Intuitively, there are a few potential strategies. For instance, making an offer the third time an applicant trumps everyone seen so far — or maybe the fourth time. Or perhaps taking the next best-yet applicant to come along after a long "drought" — a long streak of poor ones.
But as it happens, neither of these relatively sensible strategies comes out on top. Instead, the optimal solution takes the form of what we'll call the Look-Then-Leap Rule: You set a predetermined amount of time for "looking" — that is, exploring your options, gathering data — in which you categorically don't choose anyone, no matter how impressive. After that point, you enter the "leap" phase, prepared to instantly commit to anyone who outshines the best applicant you saw in the look phase.
We can see how the Look-Then-Leap Rule emerges by considering how the secretary problem plays out in the smallest applicant pools. With just one applicant the problem is easy to solve — hire her! With two applicants, you have a 50/50 chance of success no matter what you do. You can hire the first applicant (who'll turn out to be the best half the time), or dismiss the first and by default hire the second (who is also best half the time).
Add a third applicant, and all of a sudden things get interesting. The odds if we hire at random are one-third, or 33%. With two applicants we could do no better than chance; with three, can we? It turns out we can, and it all comes down to what we do with the second interviewee. When we see the first applicant, we have no information — she'll always appear to be the best yet. When we see the third applicant, we have no agency — we have to make an offer to the final applicant, since we've dismissed the others. But when we see the second applicant, we have a little bit of both: we know whether she's better or worse than the first, and we have the freedom to either hire or dismiss her. What happens when we just hire her if she's better than the first applicant, and dismiss her if she's not? This turns out to be the best possible strategy when facing three applicants; using this approach it's possible, surprisingly, to do just as well in the three-applicant problem as with two, choosing the best applicant exactly half the time.
Enumerating these scenarios for four applicants tells us that we should still begin to leap as soon as the second applicant; with five applicants in the pool, we shouldn't leap before the third.
As the applicant pool grows, the exact place to draw the line between looking and leaping settles to 37% of the pool, yielding the 37% Rule: look at the first 37% of the applicants, choosing none, then be ready to leap for anyone better than all those you've seen so far.
As it turns out, following this optimal strategy ultimately gives us a 37% chance of hiring the best applicant; it's one of the problem's curious mathematical symmetries that the strategy itself and its chance of success work out to the very same number. The table above shows the optimal strategy for the secretary problem with different numbers of applicants, demonstrating how the chance of success — like the point to switch from looking to leaping — converges on 37% as the number of applicants increases.
A 63% failure rate, when following the best possible strategy, is a sobering fact. Even when we act optimally in the secretary problem, we will still fail most of the time — that is, we won't end up with the single best applicant in the pool. This is bad news for those of us who would frame romance as a search for "the one." But here's the silver lining. Intuition would suggest that our chances of picking the single best applicant should steadily decrease as the applicant pool grows. If we were hiring at random, for instance, then in a pool of a hundred applicants we'd have a 1% chance of success, and in a pool of a million applicants we'd have a 0.0001% chance. Yet remarkably, the math of the secretary problem doesn't change. If you're stopping optimally, your chance of finding the single best applicant in a pool of a hundred is 37%. And in a pool of a million, believe it or not, your chance is still 37%. Thus the bigger the applicant pool gets, the more valuable knowing the optimal algorithm becomes. It's true that you're unlikely to find the needle the majority of the time, but optimal stopping is your best defense against the haystack, no matter how large.
Lover's Leap
The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same that it may always be considered, in algebraic language, as a given quantity. — THOMAS MALTHUS
I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children they just about throw up. — BARBARA BUSH
Before he became a professor of operations research at Carnegie Mellon, Michael Trick was a graduate student, looking for love. "It hit me that the problem has been studied: it is the Secretary Problem! I had a position to fill [and] a series of applicants, and my goal was to pick the best applicant for the position." So he ran the numbers. He didn't know how many women he could expect to meet in his lifetime, but there's a certain flexibility in the 37% Rule: it can be applied to either the number of applicants or the time over which one is searching. Assuming that his search would run from ages eighteen to forty, the 37% Rule gave age 26.1 years as the point at which to switch from looking to leaping. A number that, as it happened, was exactly Trick's age at the time. So when he found a woman who was a better match than all those he had dated so far, he knew exactly what to do. He leapt. "I didn't know if she was Perfect (the assumptions of the model don't allow me to determine that), but there was no doubt that she met the qualifications for this step of the algorithm. So I proposed," he writes.
"And she turned me down."
Mathematicians have been having trouble with love since at least the seventeenth century. The legendary astronomer Johannes Kepler is today perhaps best remembered for discovering that planetary orbits are elliptical and for being a crucial part of the "Copernican Revolution" that included Galileo and Newton and upended humanity's sense of its place in the heavens. But Kepler had terrestrial concerns, too. After the death of his first wife in 1611, Kepler embarked on a long and arduous quest to remarry, ultimately courting a total of eleven women. Of the first four, Kepler liked the fourth the best ("because of her tall build and athletic body") but did not cease his search. "It would have been settled," Kepler wrote, "had not both love and reason forced a fifth woman on me. This one won me over with love, humble loyalty, economy of household, diligence, and the love she gave the stepchildren."
"However," he wrote, "I continued."
Kepler's friends and relations went on making introductions for him, and he kept on looking, but halfheartedly. His thoughts remained with number five. After eleven courtships in total, he decided he would search no further. "While preparing to travel to Regensburg, I returned to the fifth woman, declared myself, and was accepted." Kepler and Susanna Reuttinger were wed and had six children together, along with the children from Kepler's first marriage. Biographies describe the rest of Kepler's domestic life as a particularly peaceful and joyous time.
Both Kepler and Trick — in opposite ways — experienced firsthand some of the ways that the secretary problem oversimplifies the search for love. In the classical secretary problem, applicants always accept the position, preventing the rejection experienced by Trick. And they cannot be "recalled" once passed over, contrary to the strategy followed by Kepler.
In the decades since the secretary problem was first introduced, a wide range of variants on the scenario have been studied, with strategies for optimal stopping worked out under a number of different conditions. The possibility of rejection, for instance, has a straightforward mathematical solution: propose early and often. If you have, say, a 50/50 chance of being rejected, then the same kind of mathematical analysis that yielded the 37% Rule says you should start making offers after just a quarter of your search. If turned down, keep making offers to every best-yet person you see until somebody accepts. With such a strategy, your chance of overall success — that is, proposing and being accepted by the best applicant in the pool — will also be 25%. Not such terrible odds, perhaps, for a scenario that combines the obstacle of rejection with the general difficulty of establishing one's standards in the first place.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths. Copyright © 2016 Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (April 19, 2016)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1627790365
- ISBN-13 : 978-1627790369
- Item Weight : 1.2 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.43 x 1.33 x 9.58 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #37,539 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #38 in Computer Hacking
- #159 in Medical Cognitive Psychology
- #165 in Computer Science (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the authors

Brian Christian is the author of the acclaimed bestsellers "The Most Human Human," a New York Times editors’ choice and a New Yorker favorite book of the year, and "Algorithms to Live By" (with Tom Griffiths), a #1 Audible bestseller, Amazon best science book of the year and MIT Technology Review best book of the year.
Christian’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as peer-reviewed journals such as Cognitive Science. He has been featured on The Daily Show and Radiolab, and has lectured at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, the Santa Fe Institute, and the London School of Economics. His work has won several awards, including publication in Best American Science & Nature Writing, and has been translated into nineteen languages.
Christian holds degrees in computer science, philosophy, and poetry from Brown University and the University of Washington. A Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, he lives in San Francisco.

Tom Griffiths is a professor of psychology and computer science at Princeton, where he directs the Computational Cognitive Science Lab. He has published scientific papers on topics ranging from cognitive psychology to cultural evolution, and has received awards from the National Academy of Sciences, the Sloan Foundation, the American Psychological Association, and the Psychonomic Society, among others. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
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Top reviews from the United States
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I'm a little over halfway with this recently published book, which I'm really enjoying so far - and I expect to enjoy it all the way to the end. A lot of great and unexpected insights here, and it seems that the authors did a good job explaining extremely complex algorithms and showing their applicability to real life (though it's hard for me to tell how good their explanations are to a novice, since I'm an expert in the field - I have two masters in Computer Science and working on my PhD, and was familiar with 90% of the algorithms described before opening the book).
My biggest quibble with this book (and the reason they lost a star) is that I noticed a few annoying/sloppy inaccuracies, which makes [made! - see below for updates] me ever so slightly doubt the accuracy and veracity of other areas of the book that I'm less familiar with. The other issue is the boldness of their (otherwise very interesting) conjectures.
For example, the authors misunderstand and misquote the 2-minute rule from David Allen's Getting Things Done, claiming the rule tells you to perform any less than 2-min task immediately when it occurs to you - and essentially simplifying the entire GTD system into the 2-min rule, which is in fact a tiny part of GTD (pg. 105-106). In fact, however, Allen does not suggest that at all - that would distract you from whatever you're currently engaged with, i.e. require a context switch (the costs of which the authors discuss at length). Instead, you should write that task down and add it to your intray, just like any other task. The 2-minute rule is applied later, while clearing your intray (which can be anytime in the next 48 hours). The point of the 2-minute rule is that the time spent on adding this task into your otherwise-extremely-flexible GTD system, and then tracking it in said system, would take longer than two minutes. This type of tracking is akin to what the authors refer to as "meta-work", and thus performing the 2-min task at inbox clearing time saves you an equal or greater amount of meta-work later. This is completely in line with the type of scheduling suggestions that the authors discuss. I'm not familiar with the other popular advice books the authors quote in the scheduling chapter or in the others chapters (e.g. the empty-your-closet type books they discuss in chapter 4), so I don't know if there are other such mischaracterizations, but it makes me suspect there might be. And I get that they're trying to differentiate their own advice from "all the other pop books out there", but if they're going to explicitly cite other books, they should try not to misrepresent them.
Also, when discussing the Gittins rule and the multi-armed bandit problem, they say that a machine with a 0-0 record has "a Gittins index of 0.7029. In other words, something you have no experience with whatsoever is more attractive than a machine that you know pays out seven times out of ten!" (pg. 40). However, their own table on the same page clearly shows that a machine with a 7-3 record has a Gittins index of 0.7187, making such a machine ever so slightly superior to a 0-0 one. After some more reading I realized that what they meant was that a machine with a 0-0 record and *uncertainty* is better than a *certain payout* of 70% (i.e. guaranteed to payout 7 out of 10), but that was not what the text implied.
To be clear, these inaccuracies in and of themselves aren't huge - but they planted a seed of doubt in my mind [which is not as big anymore - see below] as to whether there were other such misrepresentations or inaccuracies in the book that I simply hadn't caught, and detracted from my enjoyment of the book.
The other concern I have with this book is that several chapters end with provocative suggestions that aren't actually empirically-backed. These conjectures are cool, but I'd have liked to see scientists be more careful about making such bold claims, or at least couching them in the need for more research to establish whether they were entirely true. One example here was the discussion about the decline of aging supposedly being a result of simply having a larger history to remember (pgs 103-104). This is a fascinating conjecture, and one that deserves to be studied properly, but they are basing it on some research work that was not age-related. I suspect the authors may be on to something, at least in the context of "normal aging" cognitive decline as opposed to, say, alzheimer-related decline. However, as stated in the text, the conjectures are stated a bit too strongly for my tastes ("But as you age, and begin to experience these sporadic latencies, take heart: the length of the delay is partly an indicator of the extent of your experience.", pg 104). I'd hate to see anyone making decisions based on them - potentially missing an earlier diagnosis, say, of alzheimer's, because the authors claimed that cognitive decline is totally normal.
Quibbles and concerns notwithstanding, I'm definitely enjoying the book and I think it's a great addition to the new genre of what's being called by some "science-help". It's also a good read for people who are tired of the same-old, and thirsty for some advice that's off the beaten path.
UPDATE:
The rest of the book was as good as I expected.
Additionally, I sent this review to the lead author (Brian Christian) in case he wanted to address these issues. I was delighted to receive a very thoughtful response from him! They will be fixing the Gittens rule description in the paperback edition, to make it clearer to the reader. The author respectfully disagreed with me on the other two issues (GTD 2 minute rule & cognitive decline).
Given what I saw in the email, I'd say the intentions behind the book definitely merit 5 stars (even though I still disagree on their presentation of those two topics). However, I'll leave the original title & rating of 4 stars as it stands for the original hardcover edition, and for consistency's sake. As I originally said, the book stands as an excellent addition to the genre, and also likely as a great first exposure into Computer Science if you've never had any.
2nd update:
Apparently, this review is now listed as the top most helpful review on Amazon (cool!). The book has been so successful that the first author (Brian Christian) recently informed me that the book is now on its third printing, which means that the Gittins index issue mentioned above is now fixed in the current and future editions. As for the other issues I had, they are more subjective in nature, and not large enough in and of themselves to merit the original (harsher) title of the review. Again, for completeness' sake and to avoid rewriting history, I leave the original review as its stands and the original title is listed below the new title, with only a few comments in brackets leading readers to these updates in the bottom.
There are predictably a number of readers who will look at this title and shy away, thinking that a book with "algorithms" in its title must be just for techies and computer scientists. There will be others who pride themselves on being technologically astute who think they know all about algorithms already. Both groups are wrong. Both will be astounded and profoundly affected by the human applications Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths make in this book for all of us. I should qualify that; it is a book for anyone who has ever had difficulty in such tasks as "when to stop looking" (for an apartment, for instance); how to schedule a busy family's priorities; how to clean out the garage; how to stop thinking about a problem; how to network. In fact, all the day-to-day problems that follow us from waking up to going to bed are addressed here by the human use of algorithms. I confess that I was grateful for the definition of "algorithms" early in the book; it is one of those words that everyone uses but many of us would have been hard put to explain. Notice I wrote "would have been" because this book explains it all so clearly that neophytes can understand it and technological people will not feel they are being patronized. And all of us who really use this book (not just read, but use) will find it has made our lives more productive, better organized, and essentially, much happier. Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths are geniuses at combining cutting edge philosophy with information we can use to make our lives richer.
It may sound like hyperbole, but the chapters on optimal stopping and explore/exploit changed my life. I save a lot more time not trying to figure out which parking spot to choose or where to eat.
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.
Top reviews from other countries
It covers approaches to searching, and when to stop looking for improvements over what you already have. It discuses sorting, and tradeoffs between time spent keeping things in order, and time spent finding them later. It covers scheduling, and how the best order to do things in depends very much on what you are trying to optimise. It finishes with game theory, explaining why some situations lead to poor outcomes for all, and how understanding this can help you know how to change the situation to get better outcomes. And it does all this, and more, with a light touch that makes it very readable.


















