Brian Christian Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Although computer science tends to be thought of as a traditionally male-dominated field, the world’s first programmer was a woman.
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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.
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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.
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It’s natural to wonder whether faster sorting is even possible. The question sounds like it’s about productivity. But talk to a computer scientist and it turns out to be closer to metaphysics—akin to thinking about the speed of light, time travel, superconductors, or thermodynamic entropy. 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?
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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..
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Computer scientists have been working on finding this balance for more than fifty years. They even have a name for it: the explore/exploit tradeoff.
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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.
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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.
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Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn’t sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it’s backed up by proofs.
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If changing strategies doesn’t help, you can try to change the game. And if that’s not possible, you can at least exercise some control about which games you choose to play. The road to hell is paved with intractable recursions, bad equilibria, and information cascades. Seek out games where honesty is the dominant strategy. Then just be yourself.
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In one particularly dramatic case, an officer instinctively grabbed the gun out of the hands of an assailant and then instinctively handed it right back—just as he had done time and time again with his trainers in practice.
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We say brain fart when we should really say cache miss.
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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
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It’s fairly intuitive that never exploring is no way to live. But it’s also worth mentioning that never exploiting can be every bit as bad. In the computer science definition, exploitation actually comes to characterize many of what we consider to be life’s best moments. A family gathering together on the holidays is exploitation. So is a bookworm settling into a reading chair with a hot cup of coffee and a beloved favorite, or a band playing their greatest hits to a crowd of adoring fans, or a couple that has stood the test of time dancing to “their song.
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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.
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When Charles Darwin was trying to decide whether he should propose to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, he got out a pencil and paper and weighed every possible consequence. In favor of marriage he listed children, companionship, and the 'charms of music and female chit-chat.' Against marriage he listed the 'terrible loss of time,' lack of freedom to go where he wished, the burden of visiting relatives, the expense and anxiety provoked by children, the concern that 'perhaps my wife won't like London,' and having less money to spend on books. Weighing one column against the other produced a narrow margin of victory, and at the bottom Darwin scrawled, 'Marry—Marry—Marry Q.E.D.' Quod erat demonstrandum, the mathematical sign-off that Darwin himself restated in English: 'It being proved necessary to Marry.
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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.