Out of their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer ScientistsImagine living during the Renaissance and being able to interview that era's greatest scientists about their inspirations, discoveries, and personal interests. The latter half of our century has seen its own Renaissance--informations technology has changed irrevocable the way we live, work, and think about the world. We are fortunate, therefore, that the authors of Out of Their Minds have been able to talk so candidly with the founders of computer science.... |
Contents
Linguists HOW TO TALK TO MACHINES | xi |
RESTLESS INVENTOR | 3 |
THE UNCOMMON LOGICIAN OF COMMON SENSE | 19 |
A CLEAR ROMANTIC VISION | 36 |
ALGORITHMISTS HOW TO SOLVE PROBLEMS FAST | 49 |
APPALLING PROSE AND THE SHORTEST PATH | 53 |
THE POSSIBILITIES OF CHANCE | 66 |
BOUNDLESS INTERESTS A COMMON THREAD | 87 |
RACING WITH THE SPEED OF LIGHT | 171 |
THE BIOLOGICAL CONNECTION | 184 |
SCULPTORS OF MACHINE INTELLIGENCE HOW TO MAKE MACHINES SMART | 201 |
THE POWER OF KNOWLEDGE | 205 |
A TWENTYYEAR BET | 219 |
SECRETS OF SUCCESS? | 239 |
THE NEXT 25 YEARS | 245 |
Glossary | 249 |
IN SEARCH OF GOOD STRUCTURE | 100 |
OF TIME SPACE AND COMPUTATION | 118 |
A GOOD SOLUTION IS HARD TO FIND | 137 |
ARCHITECTS HOW TO BUILD BETTER MACHINES | 153 |
A DELIGHT IN MAKING THINGS WORK | 157 |
References | 265 |
Acknowledgments | 275 |
Index | 277 |
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Common terms and phrases
algorithm Alice applications artificial intelligence Backus-Naur form basic Brooks build cache calculation called clock compiler computer program computer science computer scientists Connection Machine Cook cryptography data structure database Dendral depth-first search Dijkstra Donald Knuth edges efficient engineering example expert systems Feigenbaum Feynman Figure finite state machine Fortran function goal gram graph hardware heuristics high school Hillis Hillis's Hopcroft idea instructions invented John Backus John McCarthy knowledge Knuth Lamport Lenat Leonid Levin Leslie Lamport Lisp logic math mathematician mathematics memory messages Minsky Neumann node nondeterministic notion NP-complete NP-complete problems operations Pair parallel philosophers physics planarity prime processing processor programming language proofs prove puter Rabin random reasoning recursion sequence Smalltalk Smith solution solve Stanford started Tarjan task theory things tion trillion Turing University write
References to this book
Complexity Theory: Exploring the Limits of Efficient Algorithms Ingo Wegener No preview available - 2005 |