Most of the time, it probably doesn’t feel like your brain can compete with a computer. You forget where you put your keys, have a hard time making big life decisions, and routinely fall into any number of cognitive traps that behavioral psychologists have identified over the last two decades. Yet according to an emerging way of thinking about the brain, it might be precisely these limitations that recommend computers as a metaphor for human cognition — and also could help computer scientists design machines that are able to arrive at good answers, even when the information they have to work with is incomplete.
This is the spirit in which a new book arrives, “Algorithms to Live By,” by Tom Griffiths, director of the Computational Cognitive Science Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, and Brian Christian, a science journalist. The authors explain that when you think about the brain as a computer that engages in algorithmic thinking, some decisions become easier and it becomes clearer why hard cases trip us up.
Read more from The Boston Globe: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2016/05/27/what-people-can-learn-from-algorithms-and-algorithms-can-learn-from-people/R7XJ1TgLnyZCOnmzBryh5H/story.html