I recently finished Algorithms To Live By, a book by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. I’ve been putting off this book for a while (I’m not sure why) but after reading a few positive reviews I fired up Audible and listened to it.
The book opened extremely well. I wasn’t entirely sure what optimised stopping was. What the authors do incredibly well is take computer science concepts and apply them to real life problems. In that case when to offer a candidate a position or when to say no and hope for someone better (the secretary problem) or when to opt for the empty parking space and when to carry on and hope for one closer to your destination.
There were interesting chapters on sorting and searching (football games league and organising books), Game Theory (employees at companies with unlimited holidays), and scheduling.
While extremely interesting what it lacked was… how do I say this… a lot of of take away value. I felt there was so much interesting stuff in there, but I’d have loved to have some really clearly spelled out takeaways. I think there’s still a jump to be able to take what the authors talked about and apply it to day to day life in any more than the lightest way. A great read, but perhaps not as paradigm shifting as I’d hoped.
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