Algorithms to Live By

In a dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, acclaimed author Brian Christian and cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths show how insights from computer algorithms can be applied to our everyday lives to help solve common decision-making problems. All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do or leave undone in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with similar issues for decades. And the solutions they've found have much to teach us.