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Success in distinguishing when a person is lying and when a person is telling the truth is highest when … the interviewer and interviewee come from the same cultural background and speak the same language.
Brian Christian -
One of the implicit principles of computer science, as odd as it may sound, is that computation is bad: the underlying directive of any good algorithm is to minimize the labor of thought.
Brian Christian
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Inspired by the punched railway tickets of the time, an inventor by the name of Herman Hollerith devised a system of punched manila cards to store information, and a machine, which he called the Hollerith Machine, to count and sort them. Hollerith was awarded a patent in 1889, and the government adopted the Hollerith Machine for the 1890 census. No one had ever seen anything like it. Wrote one awestruck observer, “The apparatus works as unerringly as the mills of the Gods, but beats them hollow as to speed.” Another, however, reasoned that the invention was of limited use: “As no one will ever use it but governments, the inventor will not likely get very rich.” This prediction, which Hollerith clipped and saved, would not prove entirely correct. Hollerith’s firm merged with several others in 1911 to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. A few years later it was renamed—to International Business Machines, or IBM.
Brian Christian -
Although computer science tends to be thought of as a traditionally male-dominated field, the world’s first programmer was a woman.
Brian Christian -
We asked Shoup if his research allows him to optimize his own commute, through the Los Angeles traffic to his office at UCLA. Does arguably the world’s top expert on parking have some kind of secret weapon? He does: “I ride my bike.
Brian Christian -
Consider how many times you’ve seen either a crashed plane or a crashed car. It’s entirely possible you’ve seen roughly as many of each—yet many of those cars were on the road next to you, whereas the planes were probably on another continent, transmitted to you via the Internet or television. In the United States, for instance, the total number of people who have lost their lives in commercial plane crashes since the year 2000 would not be enough to fill Carnegie Hall even half full. In contrast, the number of people in the United States killed in car accidents over that same time is greater than the entire population of Wyoming.
Brian Christian -
The intuitive standard for rational decision making is carefully considering all available options and taking the best one. At first glance, computers look like the paragons of this approach, grinding their way through complex computations for as long as it takes to get perfect answers. But as we've seen, that is an outdated picture of what computers do; it's a luxury afforded by an easy problem. In the hard cases, the best algorithms are all about doing what makes the most sense in the least amount of time, which by no means giving careful consideration to every factor and pursuing every computation to the end. Life is just too complicated for that.
Brian Christian -
Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn’t sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it’s backed up by proofs.
Brian Christian
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Minimizing the sum of completion times leads to a very simple optimal algorithm called Shortest Processing Time: always do the quickest task you can.
Brian Christian -
If meaning lies even partially in usage, then you subtly alter the language every time you use it. You couldn't leave it intact if you tried
Brian Christian -
When then senator Obama visited Google in 2007, CEO Eric Schmidt jokingly began the Q&A like a job interview, asking him, “What’s the best way to sort a million thirty-two-bit integers?” Without missing a beat, Obama cracked a wry smile and replied, “I think the Bubble Sort would be the wrong way to go.” The crowd of Google engineers erupted in cheers. “He had me at Bubble Sort,” one later recalled.
Brian Christian -
And here, the children who had learned that the experimenter was unreliable were more likely to eat the marshmallow before she came back, losing the opportunity to earn a second treat. Failing the marshmallow test—and being less successful in later life—may not be about lacking willpower. It could be a result of believing that adults are not dependable: that they can’t be trusted to keep their word, that they disappear for intervals of arbitrary length. Learning self-control is important, but it’s equally important to grow up in an environment where adults are consistently present and trustworthy.
Brian Christian -
Look-Then-Leap Rule: You set a predetermined amount of time for “looking”—that is, exploring your options, gathering data—in which you categorically don’t choose anyone, no matter how impressive. After that point, you enter the “leap” phase, prepared to instantly commit to anyone who outshines the best applicant you saw in the look phase.
Brian Christian -
They would randomly assign patients to either ECMO or the conventional treatment until a prespecified number of deaths was observed in one of the groups. Then they would switch all the patients in the study to the more effective treatment of the two.
Brian Christian
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To be human is to be a human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.
Brian Christian -
Searcher, there is no road. We make the road by walking.
Brian Christian -
Cobbled-together bits of human interaction do not a human relationship make. Not fifty one-night stands, not fifty speed dates, not fifty transfers through the bureaucratic pachinko. No more than sapling tied to sapling, oak though they may be, makes an oak.
Brian Christian -
Computer scientists would call this a ping attack or a “denial of service attack: give a system an overwhelming number of trivial things to do, and the important things get lost in the chaos.
Brian Christian -
As the saying goes, the most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.
Brian Christian -
It’s amazing,” he says, “how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.” And, as far too many can attest, how it halves when you take that responsibility and trust away.
Brian Christian
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Conceptual art might be, for better or worse, definable as the art most susceptible to lossy compression.
Brian Christian -
The word algorithm comes from the name of Persian mathematician al-Khwārizmī, author of a ninth-century book of techniques for doing mathematics by hand. The earliest known mathematical algorithms, however, predate even al-Khwārizmī’s work: a four-thousand-year-old Sumerian clay tablet found near Baghdad describes a scheme for long division.
Brian Christian -
It is this same central personal vision that is crucial for Nietzsche, who goes so far as to say, “Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste! It is precisely the central personal vision of Lanier and single taste of Nietzsche that is lacking in most chatbots.
Brian Christian -
There are many ways to relax a problem, and we’ve seen three of the most important. The first, Constraint Relaxation, simply removes some constraints altogether and makes progress on a looser form of the problem before coming back to reality. The second, Continuous Relaxation, turns discrete or binary choices into continua: when deciding between iced tea and lemonade, first imagine a 50–50 “Arnold Palmer” blend and then round it up or down. The third, Lagrangian Relaxation, turns impossibilities into mere penalties, teaching the art of bending the rules..
Brian Christian