Hannah Fry Collection 3 Books Set (Hello World, Indisputable Existence of Santa)

You are accused of a crime. Who would you rather determined your fate – a human or an algorithm? An algorithm is more consistent and less prone to error of judgement. Yet a human can look you in the eye before passing sentence. Welcome to the age of the algorithm, the story of a not-too-distant future where machines rule supreme, making important decisions – in healthcare, transport, finance, security, what we watch, where we go even who we send to prison. So how much should we rely on them? What kind of future do we want? Hannah Fry takes us on a tour of the good, the bad and the downright ugly of the algorithms that surround us. In Hello World she lifts the lid on their inner workings, demonstrates their power, exposes their limitations, and examines whether they really are an improvement on the humans they are replacing.

How do you apply game theory to select who should be on your Christmas shopping list ? Can you predict Her Majesty's Christmas Message? Will calculations show Santa is getting steadily thinner - shimmying up and down chimneys for a whole night - or fatter - as he tucks into a mince pie and a glass of sherry in billions of houses across the world? Full of diagrams, sketches and graphs, beautiful equations, Markov chains and matrices, The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus brightens up the bleak midwinter with stockingfuls of mathematical marvels. And proves once and for all that maths isn't just for old men with white hair and beards who associate with elves.

This is a celebration of the weirdness of the cosmos, the strangeness of humans and the fact that amid all the mess, we can somehow make sense of life. Our brains have evolved to tell us all sorts of things that feel intuitively right but just aren't true: the world looks flat, the stars seem fixed in the heavenly firmament, a day is 24 hours... This book is crammed full of tales of how stuff really works. With the power of science, Rutherford and Fry show us how to bypass our monkey-brains, taking us on a journey from the origin of time and space, via planets, galaxies, evolution, the dinosaurs, all the way into our minds, and wrestling with some truly head-scratching questions that only science can answer