How do we understand the world around us? How do we solve problems? Often the answer to these questions follows a certain pattern, an algorithm if you wish. This is the case when our analytical left-brain side is at work. However, there are also elements in our behaviour where intelligence appears to follow a more elusive path, which cannot easily be characterised as a specific sequence of steps. Is Intelligence an Algorithm? offers an insight into intelligence as it functions in nature, like human or animal intelligence, but also sheds light on modern developments in the field of artificial intelligence, proposing further architectural solutions for the creation of a so-called global Webmind.
This newly expanded and updated second edition of the best-selling classic continues to take the "mystery" out of designing algorithms, and analyzing their efficacy and efficiency. Expanding on the first edition, the book now serves as the primary textbook of choice for algorithm design courses while maintaining its status as the premier practical reference guide to algorithms for programmers, researchers, and students. The reader-friendly Algorithm Design Manual provides straightforward access to combinatorial algorithms technology, stressing design over analysis. The first part, Techniques, provides accessible instruction on methods for designing and analyzing computer algorithms. The second part, Resources, is intended for browsing and reference, and comprises the catalog of algorithmic resources, implementations and an extensive bibliography. NEW to the second edition: • Doubles the tutorial material and exercises over the first edition • Provides full online support for lecturers, and a completely updated and improved website component with lecture slides, audio and video • Contains a unique catalog identifying the 75 algorithmic problems that arise most often in practice, leading the reader down the right path to solve them • Includes several NEW "war stories" relating experiences from real-world applications • Provides up-to-date links leading to the very best algorithm implementations available in C, C++, and Java
Algorithms have made our lives more efficient and entertaining--but not without a significant cost. Can we design a better future, one in which societial gains brought about by technology are balanced with the rights of citizens? The Ethical Algorithm offers a set of principled solutions based on the emerging and exciting science of socially aware algorithm design.
The acclaimed author of A Tour of the Calculus and The Infinite Ascent offers an enlightening and enthralling tour of the basics of mathematics, and reveals a world of fascination in fundamental mathematical ideas. One, Two, Three is David Berlinski’s captivating exploration of the foundation of mathematics, its fundamental ideas, and why they matter. By unraveling the complex answers to these most elementary questions—What is a number? How do addition, subtraction, and other functions actually work? What are geometry and logic?—Berlinski reveals the intricacy behind their seemingly simple exteriors. Peppered with enlightening historical anecdotes and asides on some of history’s most fascinating mathematicians, One, Two, Three, revels in the beauty of numbers as Berlinski shows us how and why these often slippery concepts are as essential to the field of mathematics as to who we are.
Written in the genre of Henry David Thoreau's travel-thinking essays, Jesus, History, and Mount Darwin: An Academic Excursion is the story of a three-day climb into the Evolution Range of the High Sierra mountains of California. Mount Darwin stands among other mountains near fourteen thousand feet high and that are named after promoters of religious versions of evolutionary thinking. Rick Kennedy, a history professor from Point Loma, uses the climb as an opportunity to think about general education and how both the natural history of evolution and the ancient history of Jesus can find a home in the Aristotelian diversity of university methods. Kennedy offers the academic foundations for the credibility and reliability of accounts of Jesus in the New Testament, while pointing out that these foundations have the same weaknesses and strengths that ancient history has in general. Natural history, Kennedy points out, has a different set of strengths and weaknesses from ancient history. Overall, the book reminds students and professors of the wisdom in being humble.
In Infinite Ascent, David Berlinski, the acclaimed author of The Advent of the Algorithm, A Tour of the Calculus, and Newton’s Gift, tells the story of mathematics, bringing to life with wit, elegance, and deep insight a 2,500-year-long intellectual adventure. Berlinski focuses on the ten most important breakthroughs in mathematical history–and the men behind them. Here are Pythagoras, intoxicated by the mystical significance of numbers; Euclid, who gave the world the very idea of a proof; Leibniz and Newton, co-discoverers of the calculus; Cantor, master of the infinite; and Gödel, who in one magnificent proof placed everything in doubt. The elaboration of mathematical knowledge has meant nothing less than the unfolding of human consciousness itself. With his unmatched ability to make abstract ideas concrete and approachable, Berlinski both tells an engrossing tale and introduces us to the full power of what surely ranks as one of the greatest of all human endeavors.
A groundbreaking narrative on the urgency of ethically designed AI and a guidebook to reimagining life in the era of intelligent technology. The Age of Intelligent Machines is upon us, and we are at a reflection point. The proliferation of fast–moving technologies, including forms of artificial intelligence akin to a new species, will cause us to confront profound questions about ourselves. The era of human intellectual superiority is ending, and we need to plan for this monumental shift. A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are examines the immense impact intelligent technology will have on humanity. These machines, while challenging our personal beliefs and our socioeconomic world order, also have the potential to transform our health and well–being, alleviate poverty and suffering, and reveal the mysteries of intelligence and consciousness. International human rights attorney Flynn Coleman deftly argues that it is critical that we instill values, ethics, and morals into our robots, algorithms, and other forms of AI. Equally important, we need to develop and implement laws, policies, and oversight mechanisms to protect us from tech’s insidious threats. To realize AI’s transcendent potential, Coleman advocates for inviting a diverse group of voices to participate in designing our intelligent machines and using our moral imagination to ensure that human rights, empathy, and equity are core principles of emerging technologies. Ultimately, A Human Algorithm is a clarion call for building a more humane future and moving conscientiously into a new frontier of our own design. “[Coleman] argues that the algorithms of machine learning––if they are instilled with human ethics and values––could bring about a new era of enlightenment.” —San Francisco Chronicle
New and classical results in computational complexity, including interactive proofs, PCP, derandomization, and quantum computation. Ideal for graduate students.
Were it not for the calculus, mathematicians would have no way to describe the acceleration of a motorcycle or the effect of gravity on thrown balls and distant planets, or to prove that a man could cross a room and eventually touch the opposite wall. Just how calculus makes these things possible and in doing so finds a correspondence between real numbers and the real world is the subject of this dazzling book by a writer of extraordinary clarity and stylistic brio. Even as he initiates us into the mysteries of real numbers, functions, and limits, Berlinski explores the furthest implications of his subject, revealing how the calculus reconciles the precision of numbers with the fluidity of the changing universe. "An odd and tantalizing book by a writer who takes immense pleasure in this great mathematical tool, and tries to create it in others."--New York Times Book Review