Customer Reviews

Feynman And Computation: Exploring The Limits Of Computers (The advanced book program)

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I ordered this book, not knowing what to expect...whether it would be aimed at a general audience or (like his Physics Lectures) something even professionals have to work hard to master. As I started reading it my first reaction was, groan, I've been programming for over fifteen years and this is definitely for total beginners. He gives a brief introduction, a "file clerk model" and then introduces "instruction sets". With his first exercise you begin to realize this is not going to be bedside reading. If you try to think the problems through it is definitely uphill, but once you get to the peaks the sight is exhilarating... This book is demanding but ranks among the best to have come out in a long time (but then I happen to like the three major aspects of the book, math, physics and computer science so maybe I am just a bit biased).

I know I'm not supposed to discuss other reviews, but I would like to point out that the previous review is for a different book! It is for the Feynman Lectures on Computation! And that is an excellent book which is very useful (although probably insufficient) for anyone taking (or teaching) a class on the theory of computation.

This book is quite different. It's a collection of intriguing articles, as well as some reminiscences about Richard Feynman. Feynman had a tendency to tell fascinating stories. It was part and parcel of his style. And it's generally fun to see more of his stories and more stories about him.

The book is divided into five parts. The first is related to the Feynman course on computation. It includes a nice article on neural networks by John Hopfield (I wish some of this material had been put into the "lectures on computation" book!). And an interesting article showing that the motion of Pluto is chaotic. The next section is on reducing the size of computers, which includes scaling of MOS technology and theoretical limits on size reduction. After that comes the "quantum" section. That has an article by Feynman on simulating physics with computers, followed by rather instructive articles on quantum robots, quantum information theory, and quantum computation.

The fourth section is on parallel computation. And the final section is on "fundamentals." This includes an article by John A. Wheeler (Feynman's thesis advisor at Princeton) who asks what quantum physics and information theory can tell us about the question, "How come existence?"

I enjoyed this book very much.