Are we a better guesser than a mouse?

It is compelling to answer ‘yes’. Unfortunately, the answer is ‘not always’. To see why, let’s setup an experiment where red and green cards are shown to a test subject. The job of the subject is to observe a sequence of cards and to guess the color of the next cards. Suppose that we use a certain sequence where 75% of the cards are green and 25% are red cards. The subject might choose to use one of the following 2 strategies for guessing:

(i) Probability based guessing: Observe and compute probability of cards being green and red. Then always choose the color with higher probability. In the above example, the subject will always choose green. If we let the subject keeps guessing, the correct probability will approach 75%. But it can never be better than 75%. This is what most non-human animals such as mouses would do.

(ii) Pattern matching: Try to figure out the pattern, and guess accordingly. Suppose the sequence is 3 green card followed by 1 red card. Once you figure out the pattern, you will always guess correctly.

Human is not very good at computing probability on the fly. So we usually resort to pattern matching. If we can recognize the pattern, we will do very good at predicting the color. But if the pattern is totally random with the ratio 3 out of 4 being green, there will be no pattern. We can guess nothing, and we will be outperformed by mouses.

Source: The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, Chapter 1 [Read the Book Review]  [Read the Next Part].

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Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.


About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.