Book review: Algorithms to live by

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions is a book that puts together the domains of computer science and real life. The ensemble of topics being touched is wide. The book treats deterministic algorithms such as optimal sorting, but then moves on to more context-dependent strategies for caching and scheduling. The last chapter even get to model identification, (tractable and intractable-made-tractable) optimization problems, stochastic algorithms and game theory.

All the while, computer science concepts are compared to conscious and unconscious human processes. For example, caching and the memory hierarchy have great parallels with how the human brain recollects memories of recent events, and how we can augment our brain with external, slower supports like paper. Scheduling is useful not only to allocate processes on CPU cores, but also to make an explicit choice of strategy when prioritizing the tasks that you or your team face. Up to the more extreme examples of game theory and mechanism design, when the incentive system becomes more important than the individual agents (manage the system, not the people rings a bell?)

If you like viewing the world throughout the lens of algorithms and see how the strategies of humans and computer compare with each other, I would strongly recommend this book as it will make for an entertaining read and some principles to take away for real life usage (I hope sorting socks will be easier now). Skip it if you have a very wide knowledge of computer science, operations research, Nash equilibria... but even if I was familiar with the technical part, I was missing the connection to different domains or everyday, real world problems. I listened to the audiobook version, which lasts about 12 hours. You may find it easier to skim through some chapters if you are more (or less) interested in some topics. The problem with audiobooks is that I can't easily take notes, while highlighting on an e-book reader is quick and lets me recollect all important gotchas later into a text file.