Posted on Thursday 3 November 2005 - Popularity: unranked
I’m sure you know the situation when you just can’t make a decision on something important. If you only have two options were both would be similar good (or bad) decisions, then a simple coin thrown in the air can already help, but what if there are multiple options and all have their positive and negative aspects? Than of course throwing a coin would be a very bad way to make the decision. There are many different decision making theories out there, one of them is the expected utility hypothesis. Now before you take pen, paper and a calculator out to do the math involved in making an expected utility decision, there’s of course an OS X application to do that for you.
iDecide or CHDecide as the developer calls the app now on his website, the app itself still comes by the name iDecide so maybe he should use his own tool to finally make a decision on the name, I’ll just call it iDecide for now … iDecide is a nice, little application to help you with your decisions. Basically you just have to enter your choices (up to 5) and than let the app know the probability of success, utility of success and utility for failure for each choice. Click “decide” and the app will show you the expected utility of each choice. Pretty nice, but don’t blame your Mac if the decision wasn’t to your liking, after all it’s just some math that made the decision based on your input and not some HAL like artificial intelligence (not that HAL would be a trusted decision maker anyway).
Fredi
