Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths

Author:Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781627790376
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2016-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

An “error landscape,” which depicts how solution quality can vary across different possibilities.

Consider the lobster stuck in the lobster trap: poor beast, he doesn’t realize that exiting the cage means backtracking to the cage’s center, that he needs to go deeper into the cage to make it out. A lobster trap is nothing other than a local maximum made of wire—a local maximum that kills.

In the case of vacation planning, local maxima are fortunately less fatal, but they have the same character. Even once we’ve found a solution that can’t be improved by any small tweaks, it’s possible that we are still missing the global maximum. The true best itinerary may require a radical overhaul of the trip: doing entire continents in a different order, for instance, or proceeding westward instead of eastward. We may need to temporarily worsen our solution if we want to continue searching for improvements. And randomness provides a strategy—actually, several strategies—for doing just that.

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