Skip to main content

Bad Choices - Ali Almossawi ***

At the heart of this little book is a really good concept trying to get out - for me it's what you might call a successful failure. What it's trying to do is great, and being creative about doing so is also great - but creativity goes hand in hand with frequent failure, and I'm afraid there are just too many problems here for me to love this book the way I should.

Let's get the negatives out of the way so we can focus on what's good. It's a very short but expensive book - the 144 small pages have a lot of illustration that conveys very little information. What's left is a text that I comfortably read on an hour-long train ride, yet it's being sold at near £15. The illustrations are genuinely almost all doing nothing at all except adding padding. And though Ali Almossawi's writing style is friendly and laid back, it tends to the condescending. Worst of all, the book doesn't do what it says on the tin.

The subtitle is 'how algorithms can help you think smarter and live happier', implying that this book is going to show you how to make use of algorithms to improve your life. It won't. Almost all the examples it uses (in the form of little stories that try far too hard to be quirky) are totally useless in reality. About the only practically useful one is about sorting books on a shelf (though there is better guidance on that elsewhere - see below). And yet. There is something in this book.

What it really does, if you allow it, is to open up the secrets of what's going on inside a computer - specifically in some of the algorithms used to sort and search, to do lookups with hash tables, to have linked lists that enable you to add items to the middle of an ordered set with a minimum of effort and more. There is definitely a beauty, almost a poetry to this stuff, and Almossawi is usually very good at describing it.

So, it's really not going to do what the cover claims. It won't help you with practical, every day choices and problem solving. If you want a book on practical uses of algorithms in real life, look instead at Algorithms to Live By. And those stories, I'm afraid, for me mostly got in the way rather than made the material more approachable. (Almossawi imagines the reader, when asked 'What's a binary search?' thinking 'Ah, freedom, William Wallace, Eppy Toam*, shirts on a rack.' No, we really won't do that.) But for all that there's a lovely little book on a key aspect of how computers do their jobs lurking in here. I just wish there was more content, and it wasn't so obscured by fluff.

* Yes, his characters really do have names like this.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a comment

Popular posts from this blog

Models of the Mind - Grace Lindsay *****

This is a remarkable book. When Ernest Rutherford made his infamous remark about science being either physics or stamp collecting, it was, of course, an exaggeration. Yet it was based on a point - biology in particular was primarily about collecting information on what happened rather than explaining at a fundamental level why it happened. This book shows how biologists, in collaboration with physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, have moved on the science of the brain to model some of its underlying mechanisms. Grace Lindsay is careful to emphasise the very real difference between physical and biological problems. Most systems studied by physics are a lot simpler than biological systems, making it easier to make effective mathematical and computational models. But despite this, huge progress has been made drawing on tools and techniques developed for physics and computing to get a better picture of the mechanisms of the brain. In the book we see this from two directions
Post a comment
Read more

The Ten Equations that Rule the World - David Sumpter ****

David Sumpter makes it clear in this book that a couple of handfuls of equations have a huge influence on our everyday lives. I needed an equation too to give this book a star rating - I’ve never had one where there was such a divergence of feeling about it. I wanted to give it five stars for the exposition of the power and importance of these equations and just two stars for an aspect of the way that Sumpter did it. The fact that the outcome of applying my star balancing equation was four stars emphasises how good the content is. What we have here is ten key equations from applied mathematics. (Strictly, nine, as the tenth isn’t really an equation, it’s the programmer’s favourite ‘If… then…’ - though as a programmer I was always more an ‘If… then… else…’ fan.) Those equations range from the magnificent one behind Bayesian statistics and the predictive power of logistic regression to the method of determining confidence intervals and the kind of influencer matrix so beloved of social m
Post a comment
Read more

How to Read Numbers - Tom Chivers and David Chivers *****

This is one of my favourite kinds of book - it takes on the way statistics are presented to us, points out flaws and pitfalls, and gives clear guidance on how to do it better. The Chivers brothers' book isn't particularly new in doing this - for example, Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot did something similar in the excellent 2007 title The Tiger that Isn't - but it's good to have an up-to-date take on the subject, and How to Read Numbers gives us both some excellent new examples and highlights errors that are more common now. The relatively slim title (and that's a good thing) takes the reader through a whole host of things that can go wrong. So, for example, they explore the dangers of anecdotal evidence, tell of study samples that are too small or badly selected, explore the easily misunderstood meaning of 'statistical significance', consider confounders, effect size, absolute versus relative risk, rankings, cherry picking and more. This is all done i
Post a comment
Read more