Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (urspr publ 2017; utgåvan 2016)

I knew about most of these algorithms and theorems already but the book goes beyond that and shows how they apply outside abstract problems. Thought stimulating and well written to boot, in a friendly and informal manner but without cramming in forced humour (my pet peeve in pop-science books). ( )

Excellent book, provides a lot of insight into various interesting problems. Must go back for a second reading.... ( )

Very cool book. ( )

A decent overview of some important algorithms and CS concepts. Great as an introduction to topics you might not know so much about but chapters on topics you know will seem a little underwhelming. ( )

Regardless of what Feynman said (it wouldn't matter if even Gödel said it), Computer Science is not engineering. I add some caveats to that, Computer Science is not so easily categorized, so by Computer Science I refer to the formal science aspect. Now, referring to "Nature", two things, some results of Computer Science if they were different we would expect the universe to be fundamentally different. A predictable argument from me, but result still to come is P vs NP - if we have P = NP then I think we would all agree that the universe is not quite as we thought it was. Computer Science does say something about Nature.

Some of Computer Science that is. This is where the murkiness comes in because it also investigates many other things. Some Computer Scientists work on logic, and as yet whether logic is normative or descriptive is one of those big questions that is currently left to philosophy. What about Programming Language design? Well, formal work in this area does involve proving theorems, but about human artefacts. We can further cloud the picture with inter-disciplinary work. Computer Science used to discover how fish coordinate their behavior, for example.

But, removing the mud, we have left theoretical Computer Science and that is really the easiest thing to defend as Science. By which I mean, decidability, complexity, etc. I have already pointed out this says something about the universe, I think the main attack would be "how can saying something about computers be saying anything about nature when they are human-made artefacts?". The thing is, we are really talking about computation and not computers, computation is of course a human concept but it conceptualizes something real in nature. We can make other conceptualisations of course, but so long as there is a morphism between them and nature, anything we say about them is also said about the universe around us. ( )