Tomlinson, Ray
town size distributions
Toxoplasma gondii
traffic
tragedy of the commons
training scars
transit systems
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
ACKs and
backchannels and
flow control and
price of anarchy and
traveling salesman problem
Treat, Tyler
“Treatise on the Probability of the Causes of Events” (Laplace)
Tree, Jean Fox
Trick, Michael
triple handshake
triple-or-nothing game
trip planning. See also traveling salesman problem
Turing, Alan
Turing machine
turn-taking
Tuskegee Syphilis Study
Tversky, Amos
Twain, Mark
twin primes
Twitter
two-factor models
two-machine scheduling
UC Berkeley
Ulam, Stanislaw “Stan”
Ullman, Ellen
uncertainty
Unilever
“Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data, The” (Norvig)
“up or out” system
Upper Confidence Bound
urban planners
US Armed Forces
US Census
US House of Representatives
US Public Health Service
U-turns
vacation
email and
itinerary of
policy on
vaccination
Vail, Alfred
valet stand
veil of ignorance
verification, gap between search and
Vickrey, William
Vickrey auction
Vita Coco
voicemail
voice transmission, Internet
Voltaire
Von Neumann, John
Wagenmakers, E.-J.
Wagner, Richard
waiting, cost-benefit of
“Walking” (Thoreau)
Walpole, Horace
war
Ware, Jim
Warhol, Andy
Washington Star
wealth
web design
websites. See also Internet
advertising and
“Akamaized”
Exponential Backoff and
malicious
wedding seating plan
Wedgwood, Emma
weighted strategies
Welch, Ivo
Whitney, Hassler
Whittaker, Steve
Whittle, Peter
Wikipedia
Wilkes, Maurice
Williams, Robin
Win-Stay, Lose-Shift
wireless networking
wisdom
wishful thinking
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
work hours
World War II
worst-case analysis
Wright, Steven
X-Files, The (TV show)
Yeltsin, Boris
Yngve, Victor
Young, Dean
Zelen, Marvin
Zelen algorithm
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig)
Zen of Python, The
zero-sum
zero-zero option
Zijlstra, Peter
Z-order
Acknowledgments
Thank you, first, to the researchers, practitioners, and experts who made time to sit down with us and discuss their work and broader perspectives: to Dave Ackley, Steve Albert, John Anderson, Jeff Atwood, Neil Bearden, Rik Belew, Donald Berry, Avrim Blum, Laura Carstensen, Nick Chater, Stuart Cheshire, Paras Chopra, Herbert Clark, Ruth Corbin, Robert X. Cringely, Peter Denning, Raymond Dong, Elizabeth Dupuis, Joseph Dwyer, David Estlund, Christina Fang, Thomas Ferguson, Jessica Flack, James Fogarty, Jean E. Fox Tree, Robert Frank, Stuart Geman, Jim Gettys, John Gittins, Alison Gopnik, Deborah Gordon, Michael Gottlieb, Steve Hanov, Andrew Harbison, Isaac Haxton, John Hennessy, Geoff Hinton, David Hirshliefer, Jordan Ho, Tony Hoare, Kamal Jain, Chris Jones, William Jones, Leslie Kaelbling, David Karger, Richard Karp, Scott Kirkpatrick, Byron Knoll, Con Kolivas, Michael Lee, Jan Karel Lenstra, Paul Lynch, Preston McAfee, Jay McClelland, Laura Albert McLay, Paul Milgrom, Anthony Miranda, Michael Mitzenmacher, Rosemarie Nagel, Christof Neumann, Noam Nisan, Yukio Noguchi, Peter Norvig, Christos Papadimitriou, Meghan Peterson, Scott Plagenhoef, Anita Pomerantz, Balaji Prabhakar, Kirk Pruhs, Amnon Rapoport, Ronald Rivest, Ruth Rosenholtz, Tim Roughgarden, Stuart Russell, Roma Shah, Donald Shoup, Steven Skiena, Dan Smith, Paul Smolensky, Mark Steyvers, Chris Stucchio, Milind Tambe, Robert Tarjan, Geoff Thorpe, Jackson Tolins, Michael Trick, Hal Varian, James Ware, Longhair Warrior, Steve Whittaker, Avi Wigderson, Jacob Wobbrock, Jason Wolfe, and Peter Zijlstra.
Thanks to the King County Public Library, the Seattle Public Library, the Northern Regional Library Facility, and the UC Berkeley libraries for backstage passes into their operations.
Thanks to those with whom we corresponded, who pointed us in the direction of research worth knowing, including Sharon Goetz, Mike Jones, Tevye Krynski, Elif Kuş, Falk Lieder, Steven A. Lippman, Philip Maughan, Sam McKenzie, Harro Ranter, Darryl A. Seale, Stephen Stigler, Kevin Thomson, Peter Todd, Sara M. Watson, and Sheldon Zedeck.
Thanks to many of those with whom conversation led in short order to many of the insights herein, and of whom the following is an incomplete list: Elliot Aguilar, Ben Backus, Liat Berdugo, Dave Blei, Ben Blum, Joe Damato, Eva de Valk, Emily Drury, Peter Eckersley, Jesse Farmer, Alan Fineberg, Chrix Finne, Lucas Foglia, John Gaunt, Lee Gilman, Martin Glazier, Adam Goldstein, Sarah Greenleaf, Graff Haley, Ben Hjertmann, Greg Jensen, Henry Kaplan, Sharmin Karim, Falk Lieder, Paul Linke, Rose Linke, Tania Lombrozo, Brandon Martin-Anderson, Sam McKenzie, Elon Musk, the Neuwrite group at Columbia University, Hannah Newman, Abe Othman, Sue Penney, Dillon Plunkett, Kristin Pollock, Diego Pontoriero, Avi Press, Matt Richards, Annie Roach, Felicity Rose, Anders Sandberg, Claire Schreiber, Gayle and Rick Shanley, Max Shron, Charly Simpson, Najeeb Tarazi, Josh Tenenbaum, Peter Todd, Peter van Wesep, Shawn Wen, Jered Wierzbicki, Maja Wilson, and Kristen Young.
Thank you to some of the fine free and open-source software that made the work possible: Git, LaTeX, TeXShop, and TextMate 2, for starters.
Thanks to those who lent their skills and efforts on various fronts: to Lindsey Baggette, David Bourgin, and Tania Lombrozo for bibliographic and archival sleuthing.
Thanks to the Cambridge University Library for permission to print Darwin’s wonderful diary page, and to Michael Langan for a crisp restoration thereof.
Thanks to Henry Young for a sharp portrait.
Thanks to those who read drafts and offered invaluable feedback along the way: to Ben Blum, Vint Cerf, Elizabeth Christian, Randy Christian, Peter Denning, Peter Eckersley, Chrix Finne, Rick Fletcher, Adam Goldstein, Alison Gopnik, Sarah Greenleaf, Graff Haley, Greg Jensen, Charles Kemp, Raphael Lee, Rose Linke, Tania Lombrozo, Rebekah Otto, Diego Pontoriero, Daniel Reichman, Matt Richards, Phil Richerme, Melissa Riess James, Katia Savchuk, Sameer Shariff, Janet Silver, Najeeb Tarazi, and Kevin Thomson. The book is immeasurably better for their saccades and thoughts.
Thanks to our agent, Max Brockman, and the team at Brockman Inc. for being astute and exuberant champions of the work.
Thanks to our editor, Grigory Tovbis, and the team at Henry Holt for their perspicacious, tireless, enthusiastic work at making the book the best it could be and for bugling it forth proudly into the world.
Thank you to Tania Lombrozo, Viviana Lombrozo, Enrique Lombrozo, Judy Griffiths, Rod Griffiths, and Julieth Moreno, who picked up the slack on the childcare front on multiple occasions, and to the Lombrozo Griffiths family, and the members of the UC Berkeley Computational Cognitive Science lab, and to all who exhibited grace and patience with
book-induced scheduling constraints.
Thanks to the various institutions who offered direct and indirect support. Thank you first to the University of California, Berkeley: to the Visiting Scholar Program in the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences for a productive two-year stint, and to the Department of Psychology for its ongoing support. Thank you to the Free Library of Philadelphia, the University of California, Berkeley Library, the Mechanics’ Institute Library, and the San Francisco Public Library for both space and tomes. Thank you to the University of Pennsylvania Fisher Fine Arts Library for allowing a nonstudent in off the streets day after day. Thank you to the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference for beautiful, inspirational, and fertile residencies. Thank you to the USPS Media Mail rate for making a peripatetic ink-and-pulp lifestyle possible. Thank you to the Cognitive Science Society and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for invitations to attend their annual conferences, at which many connections were made: interpersonal, interdisciplinary, and interhemispheric. Thank you to Borderlands Cafe for being the one place we know in San Francisco that serves coffee without music. May you always prosper.
Thank you to Rose Linke—
Thank you to Tania Lombrozo—
—as readers, as partners, as supporters, as inspirations, as ever.
ALSO BY BRIAN CHRISTIAN
The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive
About the Authors
BRIAN CHRISTIAN is the author of The Most Human Human, a Wall Street Journal bestseller, New York Times editors’ choice, and a New Yorker favorite book of the year. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and The Paris Review, as well as in scientific journals such as Cognitive Science, and has been translated into eleven languages. He lives in San Francisco.
TOM GRIFFITHS is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at UC Berkeley, where he directs the Computational Cognitive Science Lab. He has published more than 150 scientific papers on topics ranging from cognitive psychology to cultural evolution, and has received awards from the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the American Psychological Association, and the Psychonomic Society, among others. He lives in Berkeley.
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Algorithms to Live By Page 48