Mind Matters: Exploring the World of Artificial Intelligence

When IBM's Deep Blue defeated World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov last spring, nearly every popular book on the subject of artificial intelligence went out of date. Though the good ones had predicted that specialized silicon brains would soon outdo the best human brains on the game's 8x8 black-and-white battlefield, none could say for certain when that day would come. This expert report from Hogan, a digital systems engineer turned full-time writer, primarily of SF (Bug Park, 1997, etc.), doesn't either, but it's clear from Hogan's book, written before the match, that the computer's ascendancy in chess was only a matter of time, and not much time. Carefully organized to carry the reader from the earliest attempts to understand the mind to current technologies designed to model logical thought and the behavior of that system of interconnected neurons in electrochemical soup we call the brain, this book is comprehensive, timely and accessible. It is also entertaining, with amusing chapter titles like ""Occam's Chain Saw"" and clever section headings like ""What's Induction? Let Me Give You a Few Examples."" Toward the end, a speculative discussion of genetic programming concludes: ""[B]y that time, we would have turned to similar methods to give it a supporting hardware system that could grow itself through applied genetic engineering. Maybe we could call it a Biologically Reproduced Artificial INtelligence."" No computer program could ever be creative enough to come up with that acronym. Or might one? Stay tuned. (Mar.)