Customer Reviews

Computers and Thought

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This is the 1995 reprint of the original 1960s book. It has a new preface by Feigenbaum with help from Feldman that gives the history of the book. This is the first computer book I ever bought (after McCraken's Fortran manual). I gave it away in about 1980 and have regretted ever since not still having it on my bookshelf.

This book is to the field of Artificial Intelligence what Darwin's Origin of the Species was to the idea of evolution. A historical document whose ideas are still being explored, it showcases all of the seminal papers and thinkers that began research in the area. These primary sources are invaluable for understanding the history of the AI, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary at the Boston AAAI conference as I type. Many of the very same authors and their students are presenting, still leaders in the field.

It looks like Alan Mathison Turing's suggestion stands the test of time: come up with a program that apes a child's mind and then put the computer through school. That may be what it takes to bring COMPUTERS AND THOUGHT together in the first real thinking machine. Proving theorems is good training in problem solving, which we learn along with verbal training, concept formulation, decision making under uncertainty, and social behavior. The first high order artificial intelligence, the logic theorist, finds proofs for theorems but gets into trouble when answers are beyond rote recalling of the table of integrals. We pull in intuition, transformations and tricks beyond elementary calculus, but the computer problem solves according to the way it was designed. So if computers could be designed to learn from routines, they would recognize patterns in proofsearch procedure and then strategize to repeat the patterns in later proofs. At the last page I felt energized from having gotten through such a challenging, excellently organized, and fascinating book. Editors Edward A Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman make a major contribution to information on artificial intelligence. So their book fits in with George Dyson's DARWIN AMONG THE MACHINES, Stan Franklin's ARTIFICIAL MINDS, David Freedman's BRAINMAKERS, John Haugeland's ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, or Clifford A Pickover's COMPUTERS AND THE IMAGINATION.