Each year, the AI community convenes to administer the famous (and famously controversial) Turing test, pitting sophisticated software programs against humans to determine if a computer can -think.- The machine that most often fools the judges wins the Most Human Computer Award. But there is also a prize, strange and intriguing, for the -Most Human Human.-
Brian Christian--a young poet with degrees in computer science and philosophy--was chosen to participate in a recent competition. This playful, profound book is not only a testament to his efforts to be deemed more human than a...

What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of the new and familiar is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not. Computers, like us, confront limited space and time, so computer scientists have been grappling with similar problems for decades. And the solutions they ve found have much to teach us.

In a dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths show how algorithms developed for computers also untangle very human questions. They explain how to have...