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February 23 - March 22, 2018
tackling real-world tasks requires being comfortable with chance, trading off time with accuracy, and using approximations.
Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you. —ANNIE DILLARD
“To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been.”
Upper Confidence Bound algorithms implement a principle that has been dubbed “optimism in the face of uncertainty.” Optimism, they show, can be perfectly rational. By focusing on the best that an option could be, given the evidence obtained so far, these algorithms give a boost to possibilities we know less about.
In the long run, optimism is the best prevention for regret.
Big tech firms such as Amazon and Google began carrying out live A/B tests on their users starting in about 2000, and over the following years the Internet has become the world’s largest controlled experiment.
Having instincts tuned by evolution for a world in constant flux isn’t necessarily helpful in an era of industrial standardization.
But pressing buttons at random, being very interested in new toys, and jumping quickly from one thing to another are all things that kids are really great at. And those are exactly what they should be doing if their goal is exploration.
More generally, our intuitions about rationality are too often informed by exploitation rather than exploration. When we talk about decision-making, we usually focus just on the immediate payoff of a single decision—and if you treat every decision as if it were your last, then indeed only exploitation makes sense. But over a lifetime, you’re going to make a lot of decisions. And it’s actually rational to emphasize exploration—the new rather than the best, the exciting rather than the safe, the random rather than the considered—for many of those choices, particularly earlier in life. What we
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“the result of lifelong selection processes by which people strategically and adaptively cultivate their social networks to maximize social and emotional gains and minimize social and emotional risks.”
What are the universe’s fundamental rules and limits? What is possible? What is allowed? In this way computer scientists are glimpsing God’s blueprints every bit as much as the particle physicists and cosmologists. What is the minimum effort required to make order?
If you’re still strategizing about that bookshelf, the Mergesort solution would be to order a pizza and invite over a few friends. Divide the books evenly, and have each person sort their own stack. Then pair people up and have them merge their stacks. Repeat this process until there are just two stacks left, and merge them one last time onto the shelf. Just try to avoid getting pizza stains on the books.
Sorting something that you will never search is a complete waste; searching something you never sorted is merely inefficient.
The search-sort tradeoff suggests that it’s often more efficient to leave a mess. Saving time isn’t the only reason we sort things, though: sometimes producing a final order is an end in itself.
We humans sort more than our data, more than our possessions. We sort ourselves. The World Cup, the Olympics, the NCAA, NFL, NHL, NBA, and MLB—all of these implicitly implement sorting procedures. Their seasons, ladders, and playoffs are algorithms for producing rank order.
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Tom Murphy applied numerical modeling techniques to soccer and concluded that soccer’s low scores make game outcomes much closer to random than most fans would prefer to imagine.
Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.
Their patent is actually for shipping items that have been recently popular in a given region to a staging warehouse in that region—like having their own CDN for physical goods.
