Comment

Algorithms to Live by

The Computer Science of Human Decisions
Community comment are the opinions of contributing users. These comment do not represent the opinions of Daniel Boone Regional Library.
Jan 30, 2021dixithanoop rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
As a puzzle creator, this book was very appealing to me. It's full of optimization-type problems, which are categorized based on the type - like sorting, caching, sampling etc. And thus, it almost reads as a layman version of Analysis and Design of Algorithms textbook or Cracking the Coding Interview! In addition, the book carries a lot of trivia and history of many classic problems. Did you know the first code ever written for a “stored program” computer was a program for efficient sorting? Or, that Horace Walpole coined the term “serendipity”, based on the fairy tale adventures of The Three Princes of Serendip (Serendip being the archaic name of Sri Lanka). Or that Jon von Neumann invented MergeSort? And it also carries another type of interesting analysis based on the described algorithms - did you know Egyptian pharaohs’ reigns follow an Erlang distribution? But what surprised me the most is that it carries a chapter on Machine Learning, and accurately describes a lot of ML concepts like overfitting, regularization etc using simple analogies! The explanation of overfitting might answer a common question we all might have - how can it be that the foods that taste best to us are broadly considered to be bad for our health, when the entire function of taste buds, evolutionarily speaking ,is to prevent us from eating things that are bad? Or the question of why organisms aren't "perfect" to their current environment. As expected, if you enjoy nerdy jokes, there's a plethora of them, and most of them from real incidents. A few of them include: regarding the impossibly tough "optimization class" problems, it was said that they so sapped the energies and minds of Allied analysts that the suggestion was made that the problem be dropped over Germany , as the ultimate instrument of intellectual sabotage; Google's ad gurr Siroker's claim that the best minds of his generation are thinking about how to make people click ads etc. But the best of all is clearly this: The comedian Mitch Hedberg recounts a time when “I was at a casino, I was minding my own business, and this guy came up and said , ‘You’re gonna have to move, you’re blocking the fire exit.’ As though if there was a fire, I wasn’t gonna run.” The bouncer’s argument was priority inversion. You can never block a fire exit if you can run! Other than these, the book obviously has a myriad of interesting problems and solutions, along with their applications to real life scenarios, mostly in optimization and exploitation class of problems. Some of them include why Hollywood is obsessed with sequels (it's Mathematically lucrative and logical); Gittins Index; Jeff Bezos' Regret Minimization Framework; A/B testing of buttons by Google; Tuskegee's Syphilis Study based on A/B Testing principles; the question of socks on StackOverflow; Why is the grass greener on the other side? (Yes, there's a Mathematical explanation!); why 37% is the optimal number for all exploration problems? (after exploring how many apartments should you settle on one?) etc. Overall, this was a fascinating read. I'd keep this as a reference book and hope to create an online wiki of such optimization problems!