Bad Choices

March 6, 2017
Following 2014’s An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments, computer scientist Almossawi takes another crack at explaining logic to the masses, this time with less success. He attempts to acquaint readers with “algorithmic thinking” by drawing comparisons to activities in everyday life, defining an algorithm as “a series of unambiguous steps that achieves some meaningful objective in finite time.” Each chapter takes a look at a task, such as sorting socks or making a grocery run, and offers two or three possible methods of accomplishing that task. The author’s quirky sense of humor is rather hit or miss, as are the illustrations by Alejandro Giraldo; why does the chapter on sock sorting feature a backpacker staring down a well? The book is filled with computer science terminology, which tends to obfuscate rather than clarify. At one point, Almossawi tells readers that “whenever our hash function happens to resolve to a location that has multiple items, we end up having to iterate over those items until we find the one that we’re looking for. All this is of course completely transparent to the user.” As a result, the book reads like an instruction manual for computer scientists who need suggestions on navigating household chores, rather than a book on computer science for lay readers. B&w illus.