Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

Still, as Van Jacobson tells it, even after packet switching was devised, the phone companies were unimpressed. “All the telco people said, with very loud voices, that’s not a network! That’s just a crummy way to use our network! You’re taking our wires, you’re sending on the paths that we create! And you’re putting a lot of extra gunk on it so tha

The term connection has a wide variety of meanings. It can refer to a physical or logical path between two entities, it can refer to the flow over the path, it can inferentially refer to an action associated with the setting up of a path, or it can refer to an association between two or more entities, with or without regard to any path between them

Being randomly jittered, thrown out of the frame and focused on a larger scale, provides a way to leave what might be locally good and get back to the pursuit of what might be globally optimal. And you don’t need to be Brian Eno to add a little random stimulation to your life. Wikipedia, for instance, offers a “Random article” link, and Tom has bee

From a studio’s perspective, a sequel is a movie with a guaranteed fan base: a cash cow, a sure thing, an exploit. And an overload of sure things signals a short-termist approach, as with Stucchio on his way out of town. The sequels are more likely than brand-new movies to be hits this year, but where will the beloved franchises of the future come

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).

The untested rookie is worth more (early in the season, anyway) than the veteran of seemingly equal ability, precisely because we know less about him. Exploration in itself has value, since trying new things increases our chances of finding the best. So taking the future into account, rather than focusing just on the present, drives us toward novel

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%.

is a sure thing but belated proposals are rejected half the time.

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/