W. Daniel Hillis

The head of Disney's Imagineering Works dissects the workings of computer logic and breaks it down into simple procedures, clarifying, for the computer illiterate, what makes a computer tick, and discusses exciting developments available today.

The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work

The Pattern on the Stone

Chris Aldrich

I wish I had been made to read this as a senior in high school, or as a freshman in college. I highly recommend it to beginning electrical engineering and biomedical engineering students, as well as those interested in broad-based popular science.

It provides a great overview of the fields of electrical engineering and even some biomedical engineering, pulling together many of their interdivisional ideas while covering topics like Boolean algebra/logic, feedback control systems, biology, the brain, evolution, neural networks, computer science and programming, nature vs. nurture debate, cognitive psychology, imaging/image processing, signals & systems, technology, ethics, philosophy and even history.

It contains an inquisitive feel that is integral to a true understanding of engineering. It also has some broad based questions that students should be made to think about and maybe eventually solve. It wonderfully ties together a lot of theory in to a coherent text that will help create better engineers (and even thinkers). How do we create questions and then go about answering them. Lots of students suffer from not knowing how all the theory and knowledge interrelate. This book helps synthesize many things into a better whole and allows the reader to see the small pieces that integrate into the big picture.

Anthony Bosio

KW Tan

Daniel Hillis

Will computers become thinking machines? A scientist at the cutting-edge of current research gives his provocative analysis. The world was shocked when a computer, Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov, arguably the greatest human chess player ever to have lived. This remarkable victory, and other, more day-to-day innovations, beg serious questions: what are the limits of what computers can do? Can they think? Do they learn? Discussions of these questions tend to get muddled because most people have only the vaguest idea of how computers actually work. This book explains the inner workings of computers in a way that does not require a profound knowledge of mathematics nor an understanding of electrical engineering. Starting with an account of how computers are built and why they work, W. Daniel Hillis describes what they can and cannot do - at the present time - before explaining how a computer can surpass its programmer and, finally, where humanity has reached in its quest for a true Thinking Machine.

The Pattern on the Stone The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work

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