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A review by macloo
Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Hannah Fry
4.0
I've read a bunch of books sorta kinda similar to this one, but this beats most of them for a very specific reason — it's a book of stories about how algorithms are used in the world, and each story has a definite point. Unlike Algorithms to Live By, which tells stories about specific algorithms, this book (despite being written by a mathematician) doesn't delve into the workings of any of the algorithms and hardly names any of them.
Here's a blog post in which I summarized the ideas in each chapter.
Instead, in seven chapters simply titled Power, Data, Justice, Medicine, Cars, Crime, and Art, author Hannah Fry describes examples in each of those areas. Even though I've been reading a lot in the topics of algorithms and artificial intelligence over the past year, most of her examples were not ones I'd read about before. This impressed me! Even when she did use an example I'm very familiar with (e.g. the COMPAS system for assessing risk of re-offending by people who have been arrested by police), I didn't feel a need to skip over it (although I probably scanned those parts quickly).
At the start of the Power chapter, she talks about Deep Blue beating world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Now, that's a way to get me to toss aside a book! I've read at least five articles about chess algorithms and/or Deep Blue in the past few months! But I didn't toss this book out, because at the end of the brief anecdote, Fry made a point about expectations — "the power of an algorithm isn't limited to what is contained in its lines of code."
For someone who's just looking for a well-thought-out book to tell them what the fuss about algorithms is all about, this is perfect. And even for someone who, like me, has read almost too much about algorithms — it's still a darned good book.
Details about categories of algorithms (prioritization, classification, association, filtering; rule-based vs. machine learning) are handled right up front in the Power chapter.
.
Here's a blog post in which I summarized the ideas in each chapter.
Instead, in seven chapters simply titled Power, Data, Justice, Medicine, Cars, Crime, and Art, author Hannah Fry describes examples in each of those areas. Even though I've been reading a lot in the topics of algorithms and artificial intelligence over the past year, most of her examples were not ones I'd read about before. This impressed me! Even when she did use an example I'm very familiar with (e.g. the COMPAS system for assessing risk of re-offending by people who have been arrested by police), I didn't feel a need to skip over it (although I probably scanned those parts quickly).
At the start of the Power chapter, she talks about Deep Blue beating world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Now, that's a way to get me to toss aside a book! I've read at least five articles about chess algorithms and/or Deep Blue in the past few months! But I didn't toss this book out, because at the end of the brief anecdote, Fry made a point about expectations — "the power of an algorithm isn't limited to what is contained in its lines of code."
For someone who's just looking for a well-thought-out book to tell them what the fuss about algorithms is all about, this is perfect. And even for someone who, like me, has read almost too much about algorithms — it's still a darned good book.
Details about categories of algorithms (prioritization, classification, association, filtering; rule-based vs. machine learning) are handled right up front in the Power chapter.
.