Customer Reviews

The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have to strongly disagree with the previous reviewer ("A reader from USA"). While this book covers a tremendous amount of material (over 500 pages, I think), the author manages to give you the intuitive explanation, the meaty equations underneath, figures and text to explain every part of the equations, and source code for simulations. I know of no other book that explains things so thoroughly.

To be honest, this is a book that will make you think at every page. But you can't read this book without thinking. If you are a good match for this book, you will use it for years. It is complex, subtle, beautiful, and intricate.

If you really need more information, type in the author's name or the book title into yahoo. That will take you to the web page. There, you can read book excerpts, reviews, and the glossary. Then make your own decision.

Over the years I have read many books on artificial life, complex systems, and computer science. Quite simply, this book is best that I have ever seen. It is easy and fun to read because Flake has a casual and pleasant writing style. Yet it still manages to be true to all of the topics covered. In fact, all of the equations that are required to understand the topics are given, but Flake gives you the intuition that you need to understand them by giving many figures, metaphors, and analogies.

Plus, the source code and images are just spectacular.

I consider this book to be as important as Hofstaders "Goedel, Escher, Bach." So if you buy just one science book this year, this should be it.

Computing books are divided into immediate needs for professional life and spiritual food for enriching computing life. This book is the second type. Just by reading the preface, you get the sense of pure fun side of computing and the author's noble goal to bring this book to you. Some book's info will only last for a few months but this book will last for a long time in your computing life.

Every chapter is filled with inspiration. The author has carefully crafted a program for every chapter for you to enjoy. This reading and playing style fits the topic greatly. Although you will still see some math notations (some are hard to follow), I tried hard to follow and enjoy the beauty in the notation and mathematical side of the story.

If you go to the book's website, you can download the source code (including someone port the software to Java source code). I find the Java demo is better to run.

This is a good introductory textbook for college undergraduate mathematics and computer science students that attempts to combine the theory of computation with some mathematical concepts and in the end, manages to model virtual life by explaining basic concepts in chaos, adaptation, fractals, and complex systems. There are better books on all of these subjects, but few others do such a good job of tying together key concepts from each discipline into the one theme of this book. However, there is only enough room to outline the included subjects rather than investigate them thoroughly.

Also, the mathematics is elementary enough to be accessible to a mathematically mature high school student. The mathematics is concisely explained as it is needed, with just a page or two for each of calculus, linear algebra, affine transformations, complex numbers, vector calculus, and matrix algebra. Thus, the included mathematics makes a better refresher than a tutorial for the novice even though the author states in the preface that he wrote this book for a younger version of himself. This book teaches its subject matter mainly by demonstrating concepts through simulations that are expressed in dozens of programs which illustrate the points being made. Instructions on using the programs are scattered throughout the book. The source code is available for download on the web, along with selected excerpts from the book.

I would recommend this as a first book for those interested in simulating natural concepts, but it should not be your last if your goal is to truly grasp the concepts presented and produce simulations of your own. However, an even better book on this subject is "Mathematical Models in Biology", although it is an advanced text. A very accessible book that is also more advanced than this text is "Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry and Engineering". It clearly explains the mathematics while tying it into key concepts in nature. "Chaos and Fractals" by Peitgen is a good book on the subject for the layperson with a fascination for mathematics presented in some depth. The book also has various Java programs that illustrate key concepts.

I am 16 years old and after reading this book, I know that I want to be a scientist. This is a great book that explains concepts that I've always wanted to understand. Even though the book covers some complicated topics, it is written in a style that is fun to read. The author seems to be really enthusiastic about science and his enthusiasm comes through in the book. I even emailed the author a question and he was kind enough to respond to me. I recommend this book to every teenager who thinks that they might be interested in pursuing science or math.

I recently became interested a lot in Nature. Especially, being someone in the field of Computer Science, the computational aspect. And this book is by far one of my favourite among all the "How Nature Works" kind of books I've read.

This Computational Beauty of Nature (CBofN) covered a lot of topics. Ranged from brief introduction to Computation Theory, Fractals, Chaos, Complexity, Adaptation. (See the Table of Content for more details).

All topics are written in surprisingly clear and very understandable manner. With as little Math as possible. (From my opinion, these topics cannot be completely understood without Mathematics -- The Language of Nature). Therefore, it is also accessible to layperson.

This book does not, however, go so deep into each subject. (You won't expect it to do that with its less-than 500 pages, don't you? :-) Instead, it does give nice backgrounds, fundamental knowledge, and important ideas for each. So, if you are interesting in any of the subjects presented here, you can go on to the more specialized books on your own.

One of the nicest feature of this book, which can hardly be found in other text, is that the it does show how things work together, where and why. For example, natural phenomena like adaptation, evolution, computation, and some other things else related to each other. How can one view this from that perspective, and vice versa. etc.

One other nice feature of this book is, you can really play with almost all concepts using a number of computer programs. All the programs are downloadable (with source code, under GNU license) from the book's homepage. So, you can reproduce almost all the figures from the book.

However, for one thing, the homepage address given in the book, in the edition/printing I have is incorrect. Maybe MIT Press had changed the structure of their website or something...

...you can still search for it using your favourite web-search engine.

About the website, all the good things are there as well, including errata. (Of course, Perfect things are very rare in Nature... So, books with some errors are ok. The thing that matter is the authors know it/admit it and tell the readers or not).

Conclusion: If you want to understand "How Nature Works" from the computational point of view. If you interested in Chaos theory, Fractals and Complexity. Then, make no mistake, you can't go wrong with this one. (And, get the hardcover edition, because you will read it, read it, read it again, and keep refering to it. So the paperback edition probably can't endure that :-)

I want to give it more stars if I only could. This book will always get the highest rating possible from me wherever and whenever I review it.

Nature herself is so beautiful. So, it's time to get to know her, to learn about her and to understand her! And this book just did it, in such a way that can hardly be better!

Great book - will get you hooked to this science. Intuition given more weightage than equations and the result is something a broad range of people can use. Whether you're the curious novice who's dabbling in chaos to see what it is all about or you're the mathematician teaching this stuff, you'd love to have this book on your table. Happy reading :)

The book covers and links fractals, neural networks, CA, GA to computability, randomness and chaos. It switches nicely between theoretical and more practical aspects of computer simulations. I think that it is comprehensive and very nicely written.

This is the book I had been dreaming of when I was renderingMandlebrot sets on my Apple //c back in the days of 1986 when I wouldskim the pages of Scientific American for formulas of new complexsystems and fractals. It seems to me like a definitive collection ofthe classics of the genre... this is the stuff that a certain kind ofwet dream is made up of. (For people who love Maths) It comes inchapters that each can be seen as completely separate units requiringeach a very different digestive effort. It doesn't contain a lot ofbeautiful pictures like some of the other books around the sametopics, but that's more than outweighted its completeness...It iscovering the whole range of fractals, complex dynamics (strangeattractors), cellular automata and neural networks on around 300pages, so there is not a lot of real-world examples,coding advice,serious philosophy or actual science, but this book has everything itneeds to be a classic. A great gift for mathematically inclined 16year-olds or people who know what that felt like, and also a greatresource on the many ways to create complexity inside of the computerthat can be applied to many things...

I have been interested for several years in subjects relating chaos, fractals and computer sciences, so I cannot help appreciating this book, which collects all of them together, offering me an exceptional opportunity to recall all these items, about which I happened to read many books in the past. But..., yes there is a "but". I found very few I had not already read. All the items are very interesting, but there are many other books that present them, and in a very similar way. Of course, I like reading new publications in those fields, in order to avoid them to fade away from my memory, but I should advise this book to people with a strong interest in the subjects, to bear all these repetitions, or enough young so they have not read the many issues published in early 90s. Comparing it to Godel, Escher and Bach, by Hofstadter the difference is clear. Whilst GEB gave me the impression of a new level of knowledge, the book by Flake remains in the common world. Whilst I am sure I would have never been able to write a book such as GEB, I think I would be able to write something not too far from The Computational Beauty of Nature, picking up from all the books I read. That is not negative rating, I do believe that TCBoN is a delightful book, and that is really worth reading, but it shares this feature with many other five-stars books.