» Chances Are: Adventures in Probability

Chances Are: Adventures in Probability Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: history, philosophy and interesting stories rolled into one book on chance
Comment: I am not familiar with the authors or their background in mathematics and statistics but I do think they have put together a very interesting and historically accurate story about probability it origins and its paradoxes and the famous people who developed the theory. I have read Stigler and Hald and their wonderful accounts of the history of statistics but there are stories in hear that I have never heard before. I hope they are all true. They all seem very plausible to me. For example the Monte Carlo method whose history I researched when I wrote a chapter on it for a US Army Compendium on Risk Analysis is covered with a story about Stan Ulam that I did not know. Ulam was one of the great mathematicians/probabilists brought to Los Alamos to work on the Manhattan Project during WWII. At that time John von Neumann was developing one of the first digital computers. In my research I trace the Monte Carlo method back to the Buffon needle problem in the 1700s. But that was a physical experiment with a probability model associated with it. Also they certainly did not call in Monte Carlo back then.
According to the Kaplan's, Ulam was convalescing from an illness in 1946 and decided to play games of solitaire. It got him to thinking about the odds of "playing out" or winning a solitaire game. For a long time he tried to compute the result but the combinatorics was too complicated. Eventually, he abandoned that approach and thought about having a computer shuffle the deck of cards and play the game over and over again. When he brought this idea to the attention of von Neumann, von Neumann coined the term Monte Carlo method for such computer simulations.
I found this to be a very nice and plausible story. I am a little puzzled because although there can be arrangements of the deck that make winning very easy and other arrangements that make winning impossible, the player has to use a strategy when playing out a hand. Not every move is automatic and when there are two or more seemingly good choices the deck could be set up in a way that one choice would lead to a guaranteed lose while another could lead to win. So there is an element of skill involved in solitaire making the long run success probablity vary depending on the skill of the player. However, for a computer it may be possible to work out an optimal strategy that could be played if the whole deck were uncovered in the beginning. Then we could have a unique solution. So if the story is true there is a hidden assumption that the Kapln's neglected to discuss with us. In spite of the very minor flaw I thought the book was delightful and outstanding and therefore deserving of five stars!!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: like the Wordly Philosophers, but for probability
Comment: One of my favorite books is The Worldly Philosophers by Heilbroner. (The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers [7th Edition] That book is a great explanation of economics by discussing the various economists who developed the field. The Kaplan book uses a somewhat similar approach and succeeds in making the topic(s) of probability, chance and odds very interesting by their numerous vignettes and fun portraits of the pioneers and odd-balls who "invented" the field of statistics and probabilities (or were they already there and they "discovered" them?). Written with a great deal of humor, its a great read. If any other readers know of similar books, could you share some comparable books?

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Customer Rating:
Summary: If you like pedantic writing, go ahead and enjoy the book.
Comment: I agree with the two reviewers who said that the authors were pedantic. They seemed to want to show off their universal knowledge, and that distracted from the intended ideas of the book. Their writing went off on so many tangents that it was hard to keep track of the book's main messages.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Must reading
Comment: "Chances Are" should be required reading in every school in America. No one should be hired by industry, the State Department or allowed to graduate with a BA who has not read this book.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Pedantic to the max
Comment: I agree with a previous reviewers who said that the writing style was dry, tedious and pedantic.

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