Algorithms to Live By

Preview

There is a strange comfort in finding out that many of the messiest parts of human life are not uniquely messy at all. They are, in some deep way, the same kinds of problems that computer scientists have been wrestling with for decades. How do you search when you cannot search forever. How do you sort when time is short. How do you plan for the future when the future will not sit still long enough to be measured. The great idea running through Algorithms to Live By is that the abstract world of computation is not remote from everyday life. It is a mirror held up to it. Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths take what could have been a dry subject and make it feel intimate, playful, and almost startlingly personal. The book begins with a simple but powerful claim. Computers are not just machines we use. They are also repositories of hard won wisdom about choice, attention, memory, scheduling, compromise, and the limits of reason itself. Every algorithm comes from pressure. Somewhere, someone needed to solve a problem under real constraints. They did not have infinite time, infinite memory, or perfect information. Neither do we. That is what gives the book its warmth and force. It does not tell you to become robotic. Quite the opposite. It shows that the very limitations we often resent are the same limitations that shaped the smartest strategies we know. We are finite creatures in a finite world, and that means there may be better and worse ways to spend our days. The book moves from hiring and house hunting to email triage, from cluttered closets to military logistics, from game theory to city planning. Again and again, ordinary dilemmas turn out to have elegant structures underneath them. What makes this especially...