Customer Reviews

Turing Option

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

 

 

As far as I know this novel is the only collaboration between Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky. And given the quality of this book I find that truly sad. Harrison is of course one of the most prolific writers in the field of Science fiction and Minsky is a scientist with MIT, working in the area of A.I., who is more used to writing scientific articles than fiction. The two together bring a great story to life in an extremely believable way.

The "Turing Option" is set in the near future and concentrates on the experiences of a brilliant scientist who has just suffered a major brain trauma. His own cybernetic researches help doctors to bring him back to life and allow him to pursue his murderers. This pursuit leads him back to his research into artificial intelligence which it seems was the motivation behind the first attack.

The plot and story telling, whilst top notch, are not what prompted me to include the book on this page. No, it was the A.I. or M.I. (Machine Intelligence), that I became fascinated with. As far as I am concerned, the concept of a robotic entity has never been explored so well as in this novel. (yes I have read all of Asimov's robot stories). If you are at all interested in this area of science, then this book must be read.

This adventure novel explains some of the theories in my

non-fiction, "The Society of Mind."To find more about how

the robot Sven was created, there are additional chapters at

http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/minsky/minsky.html or

ftp://ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/minsky/option.chapters

Best wishes, Marvin Minsky, MI

I have read a lot of science fiction, and I believe that this book tops the list for me. It was beautiful complex, knowledge permiated through this book, but most of all was if machines have a right to chose what OS they use, and I believe they say "I choose linux".

Great book. I consumed it during a week in the middle of tax season (I'm a CPA). I have read the Society of Mind ("SOM") and this book provides a good intro to the concepts described in SOM (also a very good book, with many idea that mesh very well with what a person can observe in the development of their own children's intelligence).

I recommend both books. The novel is flawed with a lot of typos, but nothing that takes away from the read. Also, given its future setting, the $ amounts noted in the story are very low (even by today's standard).

This is the worst book I have read in a long time. It seems primarilya conduit for the authors' opinions and theories, masked as a hi-techindustrial espionage mystery. The characters seem conceived by adolescents. They are consistently unlikeable, uninteresting, and unchanging, serving primarily to voice arguments that Minsky has only slightly more completely addressed in his previous book, The Society of Mind. The inane and boring plot shows a glimmer of promise at the very end for two reasons: One is a betrayal that is unexpected only because it appears in this otherwise flat book. The other is a one-page encounter with the only character who is even mildly interesting.

The pointed descriptions of everyday use of technology now being researched at the MIT Media Lab is distracting. The authors use grammar that is adulterated by the frequent, jarring, annoying omission of the subjects of sentences, both in the narrative as well as human and robot dialogs. This type of writing has the pretense of revolutionary style, while really exposing a complete lack of expressiveness.

If you want to know Minsky's theories about AI as well as his opinions on a wide range of subjects, you will find The Society of Mind far more thought-provoking and interesting than this book. If you want a simply but clearly articulated vision of the future as suggested by the work at MIT's Media Lab, read Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital. If you want entertaining and surprising science fiction about robots, read Isaac Asimov's short stories. Read them by the light of a fire, and fuel it with The Turing Option. END

I've almost finished this book and find it interesting but flawed to some degree. I first encountered it way back in 1998, on the Net. The famous MIT computer scientist, Marvin Minsky and some other guy named Harry Harrison had written a draft of a story about a robot intelligence. It was a website with courier text script, and I found it engrossing. Now 13 years later I have the book and I'm a little disappointed. It's in the main cornball detective prose. I was hoping to see an improvement in the writing. But, the tale is really an excuse to lecture us on the state of AI research in 1992. As you might expect the image it gives of 2023 is way off what really developed. It's per-Internet, so some many things that would be in their wonderful future never occurred. At points it's kinda funny. For instance to see them explain a portable device called GRAM that could store up to 1 gig of data, HA! Why any flash drive these days tops that by what 10 or 20 gig. Or how 'bout PCs that faxes data, another giggle. Remember it was written in 1992. But, it's portraying 2023. To be fair, they get it right on a few things. The anticipate cell phones and flat-screen monitors, but because they could not have known about WWW, most of their future world is not ours now just 12 years from 2023.

But, what I most wanted to read about was this robot Robin (which the final version calls Sven)that is learning to be human. That was rich food for investigation and I'm a 100 pages to the end and very little of the bot in it. What a let down. I give it 75 as a score.

One final comment, Minsky wrote the science, the Harrison guy wrote the romance and plot. Minsky you could have done this without him. And the proofreading errors in the copy I have are numerous. At one point the hero of the novel Brian is misspelled as Brain, twice! And it's a published hardcover book no less! you believe that! No best seller here.

The people that panned this obviously are not my kind of people. Yes, it is no literary masterpiece. But it is chock full of very interesting and plausible ideas about minds and building AGI. Or is that MI or MGI? :) I very very much enjoyed it. Hard science fiction in an area I am very interested in. What is not to like?

I found this hardcover for a whopping $2 at a used book store; since I've always enjoyed the sci-fi of Harry Harrision, I thought I'd give it a read. I wasn't disappointed. This is a combination thriller-near future novel with numerous twists and turns in plot and a lot of speculations on human mind vs machine comparisons. I fail to comprehend some of the other reviewers' lack of enthusiasm. In addition to a lot of intriguing AI research, there is also a lot of solid brain neuroscience. The writing is straightforward, in a logical order, and free of extraneous details. The merger of humans and machines has begun, and this novel set in 2024 provides much food for thought and a good story to boot!

Harrison's a pretty good SF writer and Minsky is a leader in AI, so this seemed a good bet. Not so. The writing is wooden, mechanical and impersonal. All of the characters talk the same and we have to rely on the authors to tell us what each of them is like. Which often comes as a surprise. 15 years is a long time for any book that centers on computer technology, so one wouldn't expect this to have aged well. But consider: Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is from 1962, this from 1992. Heinlein's book is fresh and thought provoking, this one is just boring. The computer ideas aren't really very interesting and, really, Minsky should have known better. So how can you have the right ingredients and have such a lousy result? I got this used and very cheap. It's still a waste of time. Alas.

MARVIN MINSKY MANAGED TO DISTILLATE VERY INTERESTING CONCEPTS
ABOUT AI.
ALTHOUGH THERE WERE MANY TYPOGRAPHIC ERRORS IN THIS EDITION,
IT REMAINS READABLE...
I ENJOYED READING IT AND LOOK FOR THE SECOND VOLUME WHERE WE
WILL PROBABLY LEARN HOW HORMONS INTERACT WITH CONSCIOUS DECISIONS.

I WAS AS ADDICT TO MY BOOK DURING 5 DAYS AS WHEN READING THE
LAST FROM DAN SIMMONS.