Customer Reviews

Cellular Automata Transforms: Theory and Applications in Multimedia Compression, Encryption, and Modeling (Multimedia Systems and Applications)

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I'm a computer science student working on a masters degree and looking for a thesis topic. CA are an interest of mine and I thought this book might give me some ideas. My first complaint is that there was obviously no quality control. The last paragraph on page 6 is mistakenly reprinted on page 7, and the same thing happens again on pages 8 & 9. Ok, not a huge problem, but it does lead me to question the validity the rest of the book, and when one pays close to $$$$ for a book, it's a slap in the face when such a simple error is not caught before mass publication. I don't know if there is more than one edition, but my copy has a 2000 copyright.

My second complaint is, like another reviewer stated, the reader is often left scratching his/her head trying to understand the rationale/logic of statements as often little or no explaination. I haven't been able to figure out Table 2.1 which is an example of mapping Wolfram Rules (a widely accepted and understood rule numbering scheme) to the author's (I presume) invented "w-set". I tried using his explaination: W7 = x0; W6 = x1 - W7; etc... to make sense of the table but I couldn't get the results in the table using his algorithm. I'm not saying he's wrong, though my faith in the correctness of the book is shaky, but he doesn't clearly explain himself.

I thought this was an excellent book. I'd been briefed on cellular automata before reading this book, so I did not find the read difficult. This is not a book for beginners; I feel it is more geared towards those who have a basic understanding of cellular automata and want to go deeper and learn more. This book discussed inventive uses for the cellular automata rule (particularly data encryption, which I found to be an exceptional use of the rule). If the author writes another version...I will be one of the first in line to purchase it.

This book is definitely not for beginners. It has a lot of ideas inside but a only a few of them are explained. Moreover, C-Code doesn't seem to work. I can't wait for the (un-bugged) second version. Good try though.