Brains, Machines, and Mathematics: Edition 2
Dec 2012 · Springer Science & Business Media
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Ebook
202
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About this ebook
This is a book whose time has come-again. The first edition (published by McGraw-Hill in 1964) was written in 1962, and it celebrated a number of approaches to developing an automata theory that could provide insights into the processing of information in brainlike machines, making it accessible to readers with no more than a college freshman's knowledge of mathematics. The book introduced many readers to aspects of cybernetics-the study of computation and control in animal and machine. But by the mid-1960s, many workers abandoned the integrated study of brains and machines to pursue artificial intelligence (AI) as an end in itself-the programming of computers to exhibit some aspects of human intelligence, but with the emphasis on achieving some benchmark of performance rather than on capturing the mechanisms by which humans were themselves intelligent. Some workers tried to use concepts from AI to model human cognition using computer programs, but were so dominated by the metaphor "the mind is a computer" that many argued that the mind must share with the computers of the 1960s the property of being serial, of executing a series of operations one at a time. As the 1960s became the 1970s, this trend continued. Meanwhile, experi mental neuroscience saw an exploration of new data on the anatomy and physiology of neural circuitry, but little of this research placed these circuits in the context of overall behavior, and little was informed by theoretical con cepts beyond feedback mechanisms and feature detectors.
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4.5
4 reviews
Walter
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March 12, 2017
Arbib is one of the few to have lived and worked continuously (at least to the degree that a person born in 1940 can - too young to read McCulloch & Pitts works upon release) through all the major phases of AI, and its sometimes fraught relationship with cybernetics, biology, symbolic reasoning, post-symbolic models, neural networks, and the descendants of all the above. His breadth and depth of thought on computer science, mathematics, and philosophy are truly original, and uncompromising: he is one of the few who keeps a steady course as the AI and philosophical fashions around him change. I have been waiting to find his early polymath works - notably this and the metaphorical brain - and am grateful to finally have a copy I can always have with me. Note to Google Play Books: I'm still waiting for The Metaphorical Brain 2 (sound of tapping foot).
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