Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market and Just About Everything Else

Rating:
Summary: Leaving it all to chance
Review: "Chance" by Amir Aczel is an entertaining introduction to statistical reasoning as applied to daily life. It will provide a great deal of information to those unfamiliar with statistics or statistical reasoning. However, because of the brevity of the explanations, the reader often does not have adequate information to evaluate the hypotheses put forward in the text. This is particularly the case in the section on selecting a mate, in which a number is given based on "e" without any real explanation, and the section on Bayes's theorem, which does not provide enough detail to allow for adequate understanding or evaluation. The book also has some factual errors, such as the presentation of a poker hand in which one player is trying to draw to a flush in order to "beat" another player who already has a full house. I also think that some of the problems presented at the end of the book were not explained clearly.

This book may be a good place to start for someone interested in the application of statistics to daily life but it will leave the interested reader thirsting for more details and explanation. If that was the goal of the author, he certainly succeeded. Perhaps he or other authors will write a book which addresses this need in the near future.


Rating:
Summary: The Guide to the (General) Future
Review: Everyone knows that chance plays a huge role in our lives, in weather, auto accidents, and coincidental meetings, as well as in lotteries and other games. "What are the odds?" is a question we are faced with so many times a day that we probably don't even think about how many unconscious calculations we make trying to predict the future. Probability theory helps us do this; it is "humanity's attempt to use pure mathematics to understand the un-understandable." So writes Amir D. Aczel in _Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market, & Just About Everything Else_ (Thunder's Mouth Press). It is a book of mathematics, but it is not intimidating. It is accessible and small, readable in an evening (but readers may spend much more time working on the sample problems), and may present few surprises to those familiar with the subject. The presentation, however, is brisk and clear, and serves very well as a primer to this branch of mathematics.

The pretty red and white cover of the book simulates the back of a playing card, and games of chance are a big part of the subject. Not only do the games themselves get examined, but dice and cards give good examples of how probability may be calculated. But more complex life examples are given. As the title insists, probability theory can help you find love (or, for that matter, a good apartment or a companionable puppy). Let's say you are entering a computer dating service, and you expect as many as a hundred relationships, each of which you will experience and then keep that mate or move on. If you just stop at the first prospect, there is a one in a hundred chance that it is the best match for you; similarly, if you get through all 99, the hundredth prospect has a one in a hundred chance of being the best match for you. Neither of those odds is very good. The mathematically best strategy is to date the first 37 matches, and settle on none of them. This enables you to learn about what you are doing and how well the population measures up to what you want. And then, starting with the 38th one, take the candidate that is better than any so far. There's a chance you won't find any such candidate, because the best match was in the first 37 you sampled; but as firm as the mathematics is, nothing in love is certain. As Aczel jokes, "Now, don't you wish your mother would give you advice like that?"

There is gambling advice. If you wish to avoid losing money at the casinos, don't gamble. Don't make the mistake that if the die just rolled a two, it is less likely to roll a two next time; dice, or roulette wheels, or all the rest, have no memory. If you have to gamble, and you have a big wad of money to blow, play it all on one big play; if you apportion the money in a series of bets, the money will only be chipped away by the odds that always favor the house. You can get advice on shuffling; a deck riffle shuffled five times still has pockets of order, but seven times will produce randomness. But mostly, this smart little book shows how probability makes a difference in our lives and in the way we think about things. Here you will find the answer to the problem about whether those monkeys on typewriters would ever really produce _Hamlet_, why it always seems as if you get to the bus stop just after the bus has already gone rather than just before it comes, why good things seem to come in threes, and why you should expect in a room of 23 people that two of them ought to have the same birthday. It's an entertaining brief overview of a classic subject.


Rating:
Summary: Great idea, but needed a lot more work
Review: In "Chance," Dr. Aczel had a wonderful idea: Present the basic ideas of probability in a context that lay-people can understand. He engages the reader's imagination through real-life examples. Given the role that probability and statistics play in political reporting (through polls), the recent poker craze and investing, this book seems an ideal gift for just about anyone who doesn't already know anything about probability theory.

Unfortunately, the execution of the book is severely flawed. The book is very poorly edited. In particular, many of the formulas contain significant errors. A probability theory novice will certainly get lost in this.

In addition, in the section about 6 degrees of separation, he makes no mention of James Milgram's experiment. One can probably safely assume he is aware of this experiment, and I think that making no mention of it (especially as it brings sociology so nicely into the picture) was a mistake.

Finally, the book is simply too short. The real text is only about 120 pages, with a large font and small pages. I was originally considering giving this book to my Computer Algorithms students as a helpful introduction to probability. Dr. Aczel does not, however, provide enough formulas and examples to make this useful.

I highly recommend this book as a gift for those people who have never had a probability course. It will help acquaint them with some of the counter-intuitive effects that probability theory has on every-day life. Serious fans of math, however, should steer clear.

Rating:
Summary: Book needs editing.
Review: The basic ideas are clearly and cleverly presented. However, it is little more than a very short text with a few examples. It is distracting to find the equations clumsily presented, and there are errors of content in addition to typos. It needed a knowledgable and diligent editor.

Rating:
Summary: This book Rules!
Review: This is a wonderful introduction into statistics and probability theory. The writing is concise and fun to read. This is exactly the sort of primer I wish I had back in college. The book will give you a solid contextual frame of reference of the subject. The author also does a great job of setting expectations and explains why the examples are limited.

There are scores of other statistical books out there that are heavily laden with complex mathematical examples which will be mostly inaccessible to someone new to statistics. I personally find such books better suited as references than something I would read cover to cover.