Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

use the distribution’s “natural” average—

exploit geography. Make sure things are in whatever cache is closest to the place where they’re typically used.

any optimal stopping problem, the crucial dilemma is not which option to pick, but how many options to even consider.

Regret is the result of comparing what we actually did with what would have been best in hindsight.

Our judgments betray our expectations, and our expectations betray our experience.

holding a fair coin than the two-headed one. The mathematical formula that describes this relationship, tying together our previously held ideas and the evidence before our eyes, has come to be known—ironically, as the real heavy lifting was done by Laplace—as Bayes’s Rule.

strong assumptions.

For your first attempt at an itinerary, you might look at taking the cheapest flight out of San Francisco (let’s say it’s Seattle), then taking the cheapest flight from there to any of the other remaining cities (call it Los Angeles), then the cheapest from there (say, New York), and so forth, until you’re at your tenth city and you fly from there

is, we take the impossible and downgrade it to costly.

just having a cache at all makes a system more efficient, regardless of how you maintain it.