Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths applies computer science to everyday decisions, from when to stop searching to how to schedule your week. For curious readers who want sharper ways to decide.
Author · 1 summary
Brian Christian
American writer and researcher
- Born
- 1984 (age 42)
- Birthplace
- Wilmington, Delaware, United States
- Nationality
- American
- Occupation
- Writer, Researcher, Poet
- Known for
- Algorithms to Live By and The Alignment Problem
- Website
- brchristian.com
- Wikipedia
- Read the article
About Brian Christian
Brian Christian was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1984. He studied computer science and philosophy at Brown University and took a master's degree in poetry at the University of Washington. His books ask what computer science can teach people about being human.
His first book, The Most Human Human (2011), grew out of his time as a human contestant in a Turing test competition for the Loebner Prize. Algorithms to Live By (2016), written with the cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths, applies problems that computers solve to everyday choices: when to stop looking for an apartment, how to sort a closet, how to plan a day. The authors argue that many hard decisions are hard in a precise, mathematical sense, and that knowing this can make people kinder to themselves.
The Alignment Problem (2020) looks at how to make machine learning systems act on human values. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and later began a doctorate at the University of Oxford.
Books by Brian Christian
New books, occasionally