Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

by Brian Christian

Meanwhile, the lobby of the Moffit Undergraduate Library—the location of the most prominent and accessible shelves—showcases the library’s most recently acquired books. This is instantiating a kind of FIFO cache, privileging the items that were last added to the library, not last read. The dominant performance of the LRU algorithm in most tests that computer scientists have thrown at it leads to a simple suggestion: turn the library inside out. Put acquisitions in the back, for those who want to find them. And put the most recently returned items in the lobby, where they are ripe for the browsing. Humans are social creatures, and presumably the undergraduate body would find it interesting to peruse its own reading habits. It would nudge the campus toward a more organic and free-form version of what colleges strive for when they assign “common books”: the facilitation of intellectual common points of reference. Here, the books being read on campus, whatever they happened to be, would become the books most likely to be serendipitously encountered by other students. A kind of grassroots, bottom-up analogue of the common book program.