A fascinating exploration of how insights from computer algorithms can be applied to our everyday lives, helping to solve common decision-making problems and illuminate the workings of the human mind. All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar...

From your Facebook News Feed to your most recent insurance premiums--even making toast!--algorithms play a role in virtually everything that happens in modern society and in your personal life. And while they can seem complicated from a distance, the reality is that, with a little help, anyone can understand--and even use--these powerful problem-solving tools!

"This book is an introduction to algorithms targeting an audience with little to no computer science background. In this book, algorithms from a wide area are presented: from music to searching and sorting, to deep learning, to graphs. The author shows how algorithms are used in practice. A unique feature of the book is that it focuses on showing how algorithms really work; not just what algorithms can do. There are many books discussing that and...

"The promise of artificial intelligence is automated decision-making at scale, but that means it also automates risk at scale. Are you prepared for that risk? Already, many companies have suffered real damage when their algorithms led to discriminatory, privacy-invading, and even deadly outcomes. Self-driving cars have hit pedestrians; HR algorithms have precluded women from job searches; mortgage systems have denied loans to qualified minorities....

"An introduction to algorithms for beginning coders that teaches readers a variety of common computer science algorithms, such as searching and sorting and optimization, as well as newer algorithms like those used in machine learning"--

A few decades into the digital era, scientists discovered that thinking in terms of computation made possible an entirely new way of organizing scientific investigation; eventually, every field had a computational branch: computational physics, computational biology, computational sociology. More recently, "computational thinking" has become part of the K-12 curriculum. But what is computational thinking? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge...