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These hard-won precepts are at odds with our intuitions about rationality, and they don’t sound anything like the narrow prescriptions of a mathematician trying to force the world into clean, formal lines. They say: Don’t always consider all your options. Don’t necessarily go for the outcome that seems best every time. Make a mess on occasion. Travel light. Let things wait. Trust your instincts and don’t think too long. Relax. Toss a coin. Forgive, but don’t forget. To thine own self be true.
Given that waiting has a cost measured in dollars, a good offer today beats a slightly better one several months from now.
At the same time, the driver needs to consider that the area with the most parking supply may also be the area with the most demand; parking has a game-theoretic component, as you try to outsmart the other drivers on the road while they in turn are trying to outsmart you.
Despite his expertise in optimal stopping, Berezovsky’s story ends sadly. He died in March 2013, found by a bodyguard in the locked bathroom of his house in Berkshire with a ligature around his neck. The official conclusion of a postmortem examination was that he had committed suicide, hanging himself after losing much of his wealth through a series of high-profile legal cases involving his enemies in Russia.
No choice recurs. We may get similar choices again, but never that exact one. Hesitation—inaction—is just as irrevocable as action. What the motorist, locked on the one-way road, is to space, we are to the fourth dimension: we truly pass this way but once. Intuitively, we think that rational decision-making means exhaustively enumerating our options, weighing each one carefully, and then selecting the best. But in practice, when the clock—or the ticker—is ticking, few aspects of decision-making (or of thinking more generally) are as important as one: when to stop.
When balancing favorite experiences and new ones, nothing matters as much as the interval over which we plan to enjoy them.
Exploration in itself has value, since trying new things increases our chances of finding the best. So taking the future into account, rather than focusing just on the present, drives us toward novelty.
“To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been.”
The success of Upper Confidence Bound algorithms offers a formal justification for the benefit of the doubt. Following the advice of these algorithms, you should be excited to meet new
But regardless of what one makes of it, the web is allowing for an experimental science of the click the likes of which had never even been dreamed of by marketers of the past.
Every decision is a kind of prediction: about how much you’ll like something you haven’t tried yet, about where a certain trend is heading, about how the road less traveled (or more so) is likely to pan out. And every prediction, crucially, involves thinking about two distinct things: what you know and what you don’t. That is, it’s an attempt to formulate a theory that will account for the experiences you’ve had to date and say something about the future ones you’re guessing at. A good theory, of course, will do both. But the fact that every prediction must in effect pull double duty creates a
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Thanks to their flexibility, the most complex models available to us can fit any patterns that appear in the data, but this means that they will also do so even when those patterns are mere phantoms and mirages in the noise.
Our human agency thus turns into a curse, making us dangerously able to have exactly what we want even when we don’t quite want exactly the right thing.
“It really is true that the company will build whatever the CEO decides to measure.”
Because overfitting presents itself initially as a theory that perfectly fits the available data, it may seem insidiously hard to detect.
If a school’s standardized scores rose while its “nonstandardized” performance moved in the opposite direction, administrators would have a clear warning sign that “teaching to the test” had set in, and the pupils’ skills were
Language forms yet another natural Lasso: complexity is punished by the labor of speaking at greater length and the taxing of our listener’s attention span. Business plans get compressed to an elevator pitch; life advice becomes proverbial wisdom only if it is sufficiently concise and catchy. And anything that needs to be remembered has to pass through the inherent Lasso of memory.
Giving yourself more time to decide about something does not necessarily mean that you’ll make a better decision. But it does guarantee that you’ll end up considering more factors, more hypotheticals, more pros and cons, and thus risk overfitting.
This means there were about 11107 possible seating plans: that’s a 112-digit number, more than 200 billion googols, a figure that dwarfs the (merely 80-digit) number of atoms in the observable universe.
the computational equivalent of sorting a deck of cards by throwing them in the air until they happen to land in order.
For decades after Miller and Rabin’s work, it wasn’t known whether there would ever be an efficient algorithm that allows testing primality in deterministic fashion, with absolute certainty. In 2002, one such method did get discovered by Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal, and Nitin Saxena at the Indian Institute of Technology—but randomized algorithms like Miller-Rabin are much faster and thus are still the ones used in practice today.
Almost any piece of legislation, no matter how enlightened or misguided, will leave someone better off and someone worse off, so carefully selected stories don’t offer any perspective on broader patterns. Aggregate statistics, on the other hand, are the reverse: comprehensive but thin.
For your first attempt at an itinerary, you might look at taking the cheapest flight out of San Francisco (let’s say it’s Seattle), then taking the cheapest flight from there to any of the other remaining cities (call it Los Angeles), then the cheapest from there (say, New York), and so forth, until you’re at your tenth city and you fly from there back to San Francisco. This is an example of a so-called greedy algorithm, which you can also think of as a “myopic algorithm”: one that shortsightedly takes the best thing available every step of the way.
The foundation of human connection is protocol—a shared convention of procedures and expectations, from handshakes and hellos to etiquette, politesse, and the full gamut of social norms. Machine connection is no different. Protocol is how we get on the same page; in fact, the word is rooted in the Greek protokollon, “first glue,” which referred to the outer page attached to a book or manuscript.
I knew that computers, when they talk, they don’t talk the way I am now—continuously. They go blast! and they’re quiet for a while. A little while later, they suddenly come up and blast again. And you can’t afford to dedicate a communications connection to something which is almost never talking, but when it wants to talk it wants immediate access. So we had to not use the telephone network, which was designed for continuous talking—the circuit switching network—but something else.
went to AT&T, the biggest network of the time, and I explained to them, you guys ought to give us good data communications. And their answer was, what are you talking about? The United States is a copper mine, it’s full of telephone wires, use that. I said no, no, you don’t understand.
It takes 35 seconds to set up a call, you charge me a minimum of 3 minutes, and I want to send 100 milliseconds of data! And their answer was, “Little boy, go away.” So little boy went away and, with others, developed this technology which ate their lunch.
In such a network, “what you might call a connection is a consensual illusion between the two endpoints,” explains Apple networking expert Stuart Cheshire. “There are no connections in the Internet. Talking about a connection in the Internet is like talking about a connection in the US Mail system. You write letters to people and each letter goes independently—and you may have a correspondence that goes back and forth and has some continuity to it, but the US Mail doesn’t need to know about that.… They just deliver the letters.”
A report from the second half of 2014 showed that almost 10% of upstream Internet traffic during peak hours was due to Netflix—which we tend to think of as sending data almost exclusively downstream, to users. But all that video generates an awful lot of ACKs.
He hit upon the idea of implementing packet switching via radio rather than the phone system, connecting the islands with a loose chain of transmitters and receivers. This system would come to be known as the ALOHAnet.
Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s
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A dominant strategy avoids recursion altogether, by being the best response to all of your opponent’s possible strategies—so you don’t even need to trouble yourself getting inside their head at all. A dominant strategy is a powerful thing.
