Algorithms to Live By
Computer algorithms in our daily life? Certainly! Almost as thought-provoking as Thinking - Fast and Slow, and just as entertaining.
How many apartments should you visit before finally purchasing one, why reading the news makes you less informed overall, why the winner can buy the auctioned item for the second best price at a certain auction, why you should state your preferences when you are with a group of friends trying to decide which restaurant to eat at (instead of being “easy”)? These, and many more questions are answered in the book.
Quotes
Hesitation—inaction—is just as irrevocable as action.
In the 1974 classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig decries the conversational opener “What’s new?”—arguing that the question, “if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow.” He endorses an alternative as vastly superior: “What’s best?”
O(n!) “factorial time”—the computational equivalent of sorting a deck of cards by throwing them in the air until they happen to land in order.
instead of turning to full-bore randomness when you’re stuck, use a little bit of randomness every time you make a decision. This technique, developed by the same Los Alamos team that came up with the Monte Carlo Method, is called the Metropolis Algorithm. The Metropolis Algorithm is like Hill Climbing, trying out different small-scale tweaks on a solution, but with one important difference: at any given point, it will potentially accept bad tweaks as well as good ones.
“There are no connections in the Internet. Talking about a connection in the Internet is like talking about a connection in the US Mail system. You write letters to people and each letter goes independently—and you may have a correspondence that goes back and forth and has some continuity to it, but the US Mail doesn’t need to know about that.… They just deliver the letters.”
At the heart of TCP congestion control is an algorithm called Additive Increase, Multiplicative Decrease, or AIMD. Before AIMD kicks in, a new connection will ramp up its transmission rate aggressively: if the first packet is received successfully it sends out two more, if both of those get through it sends out a batch of four, and so on. But as soon as any packet’s ACK does not come back to the sender, the AIMD algorithm takes over. Under AIMD, any fully received batch of packets causes the number of packets in flight not to double but merely to increase by 1, and dropped packets cause the transmission rate to cut back by half
The satirical “Peter Principle,” articulated in the 1960s by education professor Laurence J. Peter, states that “every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” The idea is that in a hierarchical organization, anyone doing a job proficiently will be rewarded with a promotion into a new job that may involve more complex and/or different challenges.
computational kindness and conventional etiquette diverge. Politely withholding your preferences puts the computational problem of inferring them on the rest of the group. In contrast, politely asserting your preferences (“Personally, I’m inclined toward x. What do you think?”) helps shoulder the cognitive load of moving the group toward resolution.
