Thanks for the post. I wasn’t quite aware of those particular algorithms, nor of the usefulness of thinking in real life in terms of algorithms.

I did have a vague feeling that “if only more people would study programming, I wouldn’t want to hit that many of them that often”, but this post raised my awareness of why it is so.

I can’t think of applying a particular algorithm in life(*), but I do notice myself thinking in programming terms. For example, more than once I noticed thinking of things like government and management, and the difficulty thereof, in terms of trees (the logical structure) and cooperative peer-to-peer algorithms and bottlenecks.

(*: The one exception that comes to mind is binary search, which I do use on occasion; for example, I never could remember how to do roots and logarithms “properly”, and when I need one I do a quick binary search with the reverse operation.)

I’m really curious to hear of other algorithms you (all) found useful for human reasoning.