Customer Reviews

Machine Beauty: Elegance And The Heart Of Technology (Master Minds Series)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

What is beauty? Gelernter, in a work that is more an
essay than full-blown book, does a wonderful job of
drawing the reader into exploring that question. He
asks, "...could a mathematical proof, scientific theory,
or piece of software be 'beautiful' in the real, literal
way that a painting or symphony or rose can be beautiful?"
The answer, according to Gelernter, is a resounding "Yes".

Machine beauty, a simple elegance that resonates in its
observer, is the subject of the work. But, how might one
sense this? Gelernter offers this: "You might experience
something resembling machine beauty, even if you are no
scientist or engineer, when you drive a nail into a
board with one clean, graceful hammer stroke." Precisely!

"Deep beauty, 'resonant beauty' in which many types of
loveliness reinforce one another, is a principal topic
of this book" according to the author. He then explores
the following two claims: (1) "...machine beauty is
the driving force behind technology and science", and
(2) "... machine beauty bothers us. We act as a society
as if our goal were not to nurture or celebrate it but
to stamp it out."

Gelernter, a computer scientist and sometimes artist,
applies his many observations to the sad state of today's
computer software. "The hell with mathematics; let's
teach of our programmers about beauty" he exclaims!

There are long running comparisons between the WinTel
PC and Apple Macintosh in the work. It isn't a "sales
pitch" for one or the other; just a set of observations
on how the emphasis (or deemphasis) of beauty and
elegance drove both efforts.

The work is easy to read yet fully researched. A "Notes"
section appears at the end of the 144 pages of prose to
provide all of the references to the other works Gelernter
drew upon. I thought the effort made to keep the meat of
the book uncluttered was well worthwhile.

This book is an excellent companion to Gelernter other
work "Mirror Worlds". Read Mirror Worlds first and then
eat this for dessert--you won't be disappointed.

I enjoyed this book, it is well written. I thought from the cover it was more about telephones and radios instead of software interfaces. I find the author's perception that we strive for beauty and elegance in design, yet are afraid to admit to as much. Wouldn't the world be a better place if we put beauty and aethetics in design up there with efficiency and price? If something is truly well designed, it is beautiful. I'd recommend the book to anyone interested in design, maybe it will change a few people.

Modern engineering systems are very complex and must be designed to meet conflicting constraints. The major hurdle facing an engineering designer is to find a way to meet these many competeing contraints in an affordable amount of time at an affordable price. Much work has gone on in computer science on the analysis of systems by formal methods. The hope of these technques is that the entire operation and requirements of a system can be captured in a mathematical model which would allow the 'correctness' of the sytem to its requirements to be proved.

This is the major ideas of such distingushed researchers as Hoare and Parnas. Unfortunately these methods have never been found to work in practice. For anything but a toy system the complexity of the formal model becomes intractable. But there is a more important reason for the failure. How can 'correctness' be defined fro a real world system which must work in a filed of changing requirements.

Gelernter identifies this problem but notes that it is solved everyday by real world engineers who must face real world requirements. These engineers are not deterred by the failure of formal methods. Instead they rely on a sense of beauty which is a sense gained from experience in how a system can meet its requiremtns. It is this abilty to see though the complexity to see the structure and pattern in the design that will dictate its degree of success that enable a human designer to function where strictly mathematical and logical techniques fail. Only techniques which use holistic thinking can succeed in in the real world.

It is often thought that human reaoning pales beside the clarity of logic and mathematics in understanding the world and how devices function. Gelernter rightly points out that this common attitude is precisely worng. Formal mathematical technqiues have failed where they have been claimed to be paramount. The human understanding of beauty is an ability to function in the world by identifying what is most suited to an issue.

Gelernter seems to be saying that the quest of many people to reduce the world to mathematics can only result in failure. It is confusing certainty with knowledge. Experience has shown that these technqiues cannot cope with real world complextity. The proponents of such techniques often portray themsleves as realisitc pragmatists who confront the problem which others try to avoid. Gelernter shows that these people are blind to the real problem and exhibit an unjustified faith in cold specific logic. Only techniques which can view the problem and proposed solutions holistically can hope to cope with real world complexity. It are these technqiues which supposed pragmatists heap scorn on which are most practical. It is poetry and not mathematics which bests describes the world.

This book is worth reading.

Gelernter knows his stuff. The other 99% don't have a clue. Read this one with Johnson's "Interface Culture", wrap it all up with McKennas's "Real Time", and you're ready for 2001, maybe even 2101... :-)

The author seems to have started out with a premise I have held to since I read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" when I was in college. My first computer teacher, Ted Nelson, turned me on to the intrinsic beauty in things computerish with his enormously quirky "Computer Revolution/Dream Machines". My wife is a designer and I am in computers. We have had many long conversations about the false division drawn between art and science. So I thought I might have found a new soulmate when I picked up this little (176 pages) book. Too bad it wasn't so. Oh, Gelernter seems to be going the same way initially, even if I found the prose, and especially the examples, a little rough. But he just couldn't hold me. I found him spending too much time defending from his soapbox rather than illuminating. He seemed to be trying to write the textbook for a college course he wants to teach instead of reaching out to the reader. I don't think I could wholeheartedly recommend this book to my personal friends, so I can't recommend it to you either. Maybe next time.

Gelernter who, incidentally, was one of the people the Unabomber sent a bomb to, is an engineer who writes with curlicues enough to please a poet from the 18th Century. He loves beauty in design and thinks that much of our modern artifacts or machines are needlessly ugly. He likes his old 1938 Emerson radio as a work of art. He likes the MacIntosh desktop as a thing of beauty, contrasted with the ugliness of DOS. He will not go further than to once mention Microsoft's Windows. He thinks that really good software is beautiful; in fact it is good because it is beautiful. He has an idea for what he calls "Streamlines," a way of interfacing with computer and the Internet that he finds elegant. He puts a high value on elegance in technology.

Gelernter also has a sharp and incisive mind. Consider this quote on the nature of consciousness found on page 23. He is talking about computers and brains, debunking the notion that a brain is an "information processor" like a computer. He writes: "...the brain is no mere information processor, it is a meaning creator-and meaning creation is a trick no computer can accomplish. The brain is a lump of hardware artfully arranged so as to produce an I-to create the illusion that some entity inside you is observing the world that your senses conjure up. That rose over there merely triggered, when you saw it, a barrage of neuron firings in your brain. But you have the sensation that some entity-namely, you, not to put too fine a point on it-actually saw the rose. Computers, so far as we can tell, are capable of no such trick." Nicely put!

This is an original and delightful book that might be compared favorably to the work of Henry Petroski who wrote the much admired The Pencil: a History of Design and Circumstance (1990).

I am reading Gelernter in backwards order, also recommend Muse in the Machine

I've just read this book (at least I think I've just read it -- the book I just read by David Gelernter was called "The Aesthetics of Computing" and was bought in the UK). I found the book a fascinating read. There is a lot of "energy" and there are many interesting ideas on every page. I think it has parallels with Christopher Alexander's work on patterns.

I don't think the book deserves such strong negative comments given in other Customer Reviews. I think it is well worth the $$$!

This book finds Beauty in a place where it is not ordinarily thought of as being- in the design of machines. It attempts to show how beauty 'drives the computer revolution' "how lust for beauty and elegance underpinned the most important discoveries in computational history and continues to push research onward today." As Gelertner defines it beauty comes of the combination of 'simplicity and power'. And the experience of it can be found even if one is not an engineer . He gives examples like hitting 'with one graceful hammer stroke ' a nail into a board, or making a beautiful catch in baseball, with ease and grace. He says that in such beautiful actions there is no 'superflous motion'. He gives examples from a wide variety of fields to illustrate this principle. "Vigorous writing is concise" he says quoting William Strunk".
If I understand him 'beauty' is a kind of rightness in the way a thing is done or designed .
This seems to me an interesting definition though of course far from an all- encompassing one of 'beauty'.
However when Gelertner began actually comparing computer programs and designs, Apple vs. Microsoft for instance. I did not really get what was going on. I did not have the knowledge and experience to really understand or evaluate this.

As David Gelertner points out, most of us implicitly hold that scientists and artists are radically different by craft and by the very nature of their work. In fact, the scientific and artistic personalities seem to overlap more than they differ. Beauty and simplicity are the ultimate defense against complexity, and all the greatest discoveries are usually both simple and powerful - they are beautiful. Whether it is software, or product design, or even theoretical physics, best solutions have an aura of elegance and beauty that is often overlooked by our schools and colleges; as David Gelernter points out, our sole focus on analytical reasoning is leading us down the wrong path, and we need to address this issue on an emergency basis.