Customer Reviews

Imitation of Life: How Biology Is Inspiring Computing

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Be warned. I only read the first tenth of "Imitation of Life: How Biology is Inspiring Computing" by Nancy Forbes. I claim no expertise and the following is strictly my opinion. What little I read, I mostly disliked.

I felt the author demonstrated little subject expertise. On page 5 she defines synapses as "the connection points between the dendrites and the axons." That had me running to Wikipedia. In my opinion, the discussion of neural logic here is confusing. I don't think anyone not already familiar with it will understand the model of a neural net she tries to present.

Consider this from a sentence on page 13: "Darwin's theory of natural selection -- a radical departure from currently accepted beliefs ...." Gosh, I though a large body of currently accepted beliefs originated with Darwin. This strikes me as typical of stylistic or logic problems in the writing. In general, I found the writing unenlightened, uninspired, verbose, clumsy, and pedantic.

I didn't read much of this book because I trusted it so little that reading became a chore. It reminded me of when I was a programmer reviewing a draft produced by a technical writer. There the minimal goal was to correct mistakes both detailed and conceptual. I don't have the expertise to do that for Ms. Forbes, or the patience. Doesn't MIT press have editors? Can't they find computer scientists to write a popularization?

I am not an expert in computer science or biology. Beyond the 15 pages of this book I read, the rest may be good. But from what little I did read, I imagined the author as someone who took a few undergraduate biology and computer science courses and decided to do an interdisciplinary senior thesis about biologic-inspired computing. I think she did it without a lot of help from subject experts reviewing the text although she states in the preface that, and I quote, "Contentwise...," [long list of names here] "... were especially helpful ...." Me personally, I didn't find the content wise.

I don't know anything about the academic press, but I'm disappointed that MIT Press published this book. When I arrived at the misspelling "accomodate" on page 15, I declined to read further in a book on computer science that hadn't been spell checked. I would expect better from MIT.

[Because I read so little, I rate it a neutral three stars.]

No, it doesn't.

The author is a gifted technical analyst, working for Government Agencies. The text teaches what is the "bio-inspired" computation in high level research at universities and research agencies

As commercial software coverage, the mention of RSA In. for encription software, IBM and SAP DNA algorithms

One of the most stringent needs is to apply learning algorithms in Enterprise Computing. Huge data centers must have policies decided by humans, designed for autonomic self-healing.

The theory of change management claims new idea in business - enterprise software is nothing but a reflection of the business idea - is a seed that must grow naturally.

The use of bio-inspired , self-evolutionary software code would be not only a great fit, but a commercial success. The market for such software is every business that operates a data center and/or a compute grid.

As I work in creating enterprise software products, I bought the book with great expectations. This explains my probably biased disappontment with an otherwise a good book that opens the gates of new possibilities.

There is an Enterprise Biology Software Project ongoing http://www.enterprisebiology.com/report_2004.htm . It's mere existence and name illustrates the need described in this review.