Category Archives: Science

Machinery of the Mind

By lytspeed Posted in Computers, Opinion, Reading, Reviews, Science Leave a reply

Machinery of the Mind

By: George Johnson

Type: Non-fiction survey of AI

Setting: N/A

Description:

During a year of intensive study, George Johnson travelled around the country to conventions, interviewed prominent researchers in the field of cognitive science and read just about everything there is to read on the use of machines to model human intelligence. 

Comments:

Although a few years out of date, Johnson’s book is still a fresh, easy to understand look at the advances in the new science of artificial intelligence (or cognitive science, as some researchers prefer to call it.) Johnson is a good writer, and is obviously an intelligent man. He understands the concepts presented in his book, even though the knowledge comes from many different fields, all of which meet at the center of cognitive science. MotM makes a valient effort to present different sides of the artificial intelligence issue, devoting time to the “engineers,” the people concerned with presenting a working product that doesn’t necessarily have to model human intelligence, and the “scientists,” the heavy-hitters in the AI world who are trying to accurately model the workings of the human mind, whether it is practical or not. I got the impression that Johnson favors the pure research side more than the commercial aspects. 

Recommendations:

This is a great introductory text to artificial intelligence research. I wish I had had it when I started reading Gödel, Escher, Bach many years ago!.

Alice in Quantumland: An Allegory of Quantum Physics

By lytspeed Posted in Opinion, Reading, Reviews, Science Leave a reply

Alice in Quantumland:  An Allegory of Quantum Physics

By: Robert Gilmore

Type: Allegory

Setting: Quantumland

Description:

We follow the adventures of Alice as she tours Quantumland and meets up with such strange individuals as the Classical and Quantum Mechanics, scores of electrons and other subatomic particles and scientific principles (and principals!) 

Comments:

Lewis Carroll meets Werner Heisenberg and the gang. Throw in a pinch of The Phantom Tollbooth and season heavily with Gödel, Escher, Bach and Voila! Imagine being introduced to the worlds of Newtonian and particle physics in an Alice in Wonderland setting. That is what Gilmore’s book is all about. He remained true to the spirit of the original Through the Looking Glass, which Lewis Carroll wrote as an excercise in mathematics and logic for his neice, Alice. This book is also designed to educate, and it does a fine job of explaining some of the tougher aspects of modern physics.

Particularly enlightening are Gilmore’s descriptions of subatomic particles and the gedankenexperiment in which we learn that electron spin information is transferred seemingly instantaneously when one electron’s spin is measured. He also does well in introducing the theory that matter is merely a subcategory of energy, and that it is more accurate to say that energy is conserved in all reactions, rather than mass. Evidently, photons and other subatomic particles are created and destroyed constantly, but the sum total of the energy in the reaction is always the same, even if some mass has been created or destroyed. 

Recommendations:

If you are interested in understanding modern physics, but can’t get past the technical jargon or math, this book provides an excellent way to visualize the processes through metaphor.

Starquake

By lytspeed Posted in Opinion, Reading, Reviews, Science Leave a reply

Starquake

By: Robert L. Forward

Type: Hard Science Fiction

Setting: A neutron star near the end of the constellation Draco

Description:

This book is a sequel to Dragon’s Egg, a wonderful speculation about life on a neutron star. In this installment, human scientists face the challenge of trying to help and rescue the civilization of Cheela on the surface of the neutron star in the aftermath of a gigantic starquake. The trick is that the Cheela, due to their small size and nucleonic nature, live roughly a million times faster than the humans do. The entire novel spans twenty-four of the human crew’s hours, so Forward spends much of his time describing the goings on with the Cheela. Many of their generations pass in the day that the humans spend on the ship. 

Comments:

Although theoretically and scientifically as brilliant as his previous novel, Starquake lacks some of the good writing and wit present in Dragon’s Egg. Occasionally, the reader catches a pun relating to Earth television shows and history, but for the most part the parallels are too close. In one case, a barbarian Cheela adopts the name Attila and proceeds to dominate the known surface of the star. The Cheela obviously got the idea to use Earth names from the logs of Earth history that they had received from the humans, but Forward shouldn’t have needed to resort to those tactics for characterization. His writing is good enough to allow the Cheela characters their own names. Some of the borrowed names are obviously used for humor (like the Cheela named Otis-Elevator), but these uses are not necessary. They did not happen this much in Dragon’s Egg, and that story was quite gripping. Forward’s readers are not stupid; if they can sit through his detailed explanations of plant and animal life on the star, they can draw their own parallels between the Dark Ages of Earth and the Dark Ages on Egg. 

Recommendations:

This is a good, mostly solid novel that should delight the remaining fans of hard science fiction. I’m not entirely convinced that it needed to be written, however. Dragon’s Egg stood well on its own; I suspect that publishers had a lot to say about the existence of the sequel.

The NeXT Step (Vorticism 1991)

By lytspeed Posted in Computers, Original Poetry, Poetry, Science Leave a reply

The NeXT Step?
(Vorticism 1991)

Thousands of programmers
Typing in unison
Hacking in UNIX on
Sleek black machines.

Weizenbaum warns us that
AI’s not where its at
Threats to humanity
Garnish the seams

Of these C algorithms
And LISP subroutines.
Icons to silicon
Bury our dreams.

Massively parallel
Spells analog’s death knell;
Hypercubes emulate
Turing machines

In a giant array
of AI DNA,
Launching electrons like
Silical genes.

Cognitive science has
Taught us to ask ourselves:
When does Intelligence
Make its own means?

Sufficiently complex
Parallel neural nets
Attain self-awareness at
Some point, it seems;

What right as Creators
Have we to berate or
Suppress the inception of
Silicon Dreams?

— Stace Johnson, 1991