Artificial Life Books

This booklet is must reading for the elderly and members of their family. Presented in an easy to read format and style by a nursing home chaplain, it contains easy to understand medical information from a spiritual viewpoint. Don't wait for an illness to prompt you into reading this valuable booklet.

This little book is a must for all adult people. It addresses the serious question of what would you want done if you became mortally ill, were in an accident or in a coma and otherwise would not be able to speak for yourself. The frank, but gentle, theme of this book helps one to think about their own desires in these cases. One may think that it is only for "old people", but I think it is an important thing for each adult to consider carefully and let loved ones and your doctor know of your wishes. I would highly recommend this book for all adults.

This amazing little book, "Hard Choices for Loving People", is one of the best gifts you could ever give a patient and family who are facing these important end-of-life choices. Mr. Dunn says it so clearly, objectively, and compassionately that so much of the fear and pain of the decision is removed. I am a geriatric nursing leader of 43 years and have felt fortunate to have found this fine book in the early 1990s. I have shared it with many healthcare organizations and providers in California...from acute care to hospice, home health, Long-Term care, and now my church ! Thank you Mr. Dunn. Saundra Jack, RN MSN

I am a clinical chaplain, and a rehab chaplain at a large
city hospital.
I see many families who are trying to help their loved ones
make good medical decisions. This book is a great aid for
them , to help them sort out feelings and goals about
medical treatments. you can tell the author has vast experience
with the sick and their families, I heartily recommend
this book for all those who are caring for the sick
or have an elderly member of their family who is sick.
thanks to a great author Hank Dunn

rev. james barry cp
clinical chaplain, lutheran gen hospital,

I am a health care lawyer sometimes tasked with helping people face difficult end of life issues. This is the most sensitive and lovingly realsitic book of its kind that I've seen -- and there are many other good ones out there. Pssst -- you also can get it through a free pdf download at www.hardchoices.com . The booklet is prettier, but whatever the format, it's a vital read. I've always recommended it to clients, but my own family used it to open up hearts and minds -- and settle an ugly dispute between my mother and one of her brothers -- when my grandfather was dying of Alzheimer's. Hank Dunn's work is a God send.

This is a great book for anyone interested in neural prosthetics and neurostimulation. It goes over the technology and also patient and doctor stories of how these devices were developed.

This book takes you on an amazing journey into the lives of not only the medical pioneers developing these complex systems, but the recipients of them as well. It gives a layman's understanding of complex medical terminology and applications and also rivets you with the true human spirit of the people receiving these modern miracle implants. I thoroughly enjoyed reading and learning about the individuals profiled and highly recommend this book.

Shattered Nerves: How Science is Solving Modern Medicine's Most Perplexing Problem explores a new and blossoming medical frontier: that of neural implants which are enabling vision, hearing and movement in patients who have been blind, deaf and even paralyzed. Personal interviews blend with research to draw important links between the science involved and the lives of those affected, with chapters exploring boundaries between restoration and enhancement and considering both physical and psychological consequences of restoring damaged brain functions. This outstanding survey of brain research frontiers is not only a top pick for health collections, but for many a general-interest lending library.

Victor Chase's history and up-to-date story of prosthetic implants is riveting. I found it to be a wonderful read for its selective history of prosthetic implants, cutting-edge science, and for the in-depth human side that he presents. The author's care and concern for the patients he interviewed comes across as much as his intimate understanding of the science he helps his readers to understand and appreciate.
I'm saving my copy as a reference for when parts of me decide to head south...without passports.

Shattered Nerves does a great job of providing a layperson's explanation of the fascinating advances medical science is making in the field of neuroprosthetics. It nicely blends the human stories of the researchers and the subjects with clear descriptions of the technical advances--and the science that underlies the technology--all without becoming too complicated for the interested non-scientist.

This book tracks the development of implants and aids that help take the place of damaged nerves in the human body. From cochlear implants that help deaf people hear, to hookups that allow people to operate computers just by thinking, reachers are successfully combining medical science, engineering, computer technology and great personal committment.

Be sure to get to the last chapter, which discusses ethics and the issues that confront the researchers and technologists in this field. This is a good book for anyone interested in how technology advances and how real people make the individual steps that add up to giant strides for medical science. It provides great insights into the personalities and the processes involved.

Charge coupled device (CCD) count the number of electrons within each pixel. Each number is stored, so the whole image can be represented by a series of numbers. Computers can see my means of this device and attempt functional replication of the eye. In a color image the numbers represent both the hue and intensity of the pixel.

One of the earliest vision problems to be subject to machine recognition was hand-writing technology. Character segmentation is important because printed characters can be of different size and can be separated by neighbor characters by different distances. The PDA made handwriting recognition an important field of research. The recognition system possess information about how the characters were written, writing direction and the writing order of the strokes and match with the shape of stored characters. In 1960, Israel Gelfand, at the USSR Academy of Science developed a successful natural handwriting technology. Stefan Pachikov founded paragraph International which SGI later buys. NHR technology underlying idea is that fact that cursive handwriting is a series of movements made by a writing instrument. Each movement can be represented by one more more of eight elements that are sufficient to describe all the trajectories of the pend found in the cursive letter of the Roman alphabet. The analytical word recognizer is based on a database of symbol prototypes and neural network generalized pattern recognition schemes and training.

Human Face recognition differentiates unique physical attributes about a person face, the different heights, depths, and weights. Computer vision systems can pick peoples face out of a crowd almost instantaneously and measure various features of that face and compare the measurements with those faces stored in the database. Everyones face has distinguishable features for example peaks and troughs. There are about 80 of these features on the human face, including distance between the eyes, the width of the nose and the depth of the eye sockets. The computer after measuring the face creates a numerical number representing the face. Usually 14 to 22 of the 80 features in a face print is enough to complete the recognition process. Video surveillance system search for face in Low resolution image of the scene and switches to a high resolution search when a head-like has been spotted. Once a face is detected, the system determines then determines the position, size and pose of the head. The image of the head is then scaled up or down in size and rotated in the same size and pose employed for faces in the system's database. The most successful recognition system can match faceprints at 60 million per minute.

MobileEye acts as a silent driver assisting with Forward looking, side mirror, and in cabin recognition. MobileEye can detect cars moving into the passing lane, distance ranges, and switch attention by changing colors indicating possible collision objects, pedestrians moving into the travel lane, and off-road path finding. The recognition software can watch passenger position and make decision for airbag deployment. Cameras on the side mirror can watch blind spots and warn for sudden merges into the passing lane by other cars. Side mirror recognition differentiates between cars not within collision and those who are. Forward looking recognition system can recognize markings on the road. "The system fits a three-parameter road model that accounts for lateral position, slope and curvature. The curvature parameter is used for increasing the warning reliability under curved roads and for estimating time to lane crossing."

The ears of a computer are microphones, devices that contain some sort of diaphragm that vibrates in concert with audible sound. The vibrations are converted to electrical signals, which can be displayed as a waveform on a screen or measured electronically. Speech recognition is recognizing waveforms. Different people can say the same word with different pitches, speeds, and intensities; all these variation change how the word is said. Dynamic time warping has the affect of stretching or compressing segments of the speech sound in a word, in order to make the waveform easier to match with a store waveform. A technique called Hidden Markov Models HMMs are used to recognize phoneme strings and calculate summed values for all possible combinations of the sounds. The highest probabilities phoneme string is selected. Visual recognition systems are being used to watch lip movement and use context feedback to improve speech recognition.

It's been about 50 years since the word Artificial Intelligence was coined. Since then there have been a number of television shows and movies about AI, but in real life AI has yet to produce a young boy to life an even quasi-normal life.

Behind the scenes however, research has been going on to develop the sub-systems needed as a foundation of AI. In this book the author describes what's going on in computers about such critical areas as vision, speech, taste, smell and so on.

The big problem, and what's covered in most of the book are what you might call the thinking components. How do computers think? How do they play games such as chess? Or one of the hot new items, play soccer. Then there are real problems like getting the computer to write fiction? Can a computer be programmed to transpose bits and bytes into thought, or love?

There have been a number of books lately on robotic activities you can do at home. This one is a description of the state of the art in the research labs around the world.

Robots Unlimited: Life In A Virtual Age by David Levy (leader of the winning team of the Loebner Prize Competition in 1997) is a highly researched and historically impressive documentation devoted to the past fifty years of research and development in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. As an informative and superbly written study, Robots Unlimited offers readers an outstanding historical survey and a seminal reference to the many intricacies of an ever-escalating modern science in these specialized fields, as well as knowledgeable and intuitive predictions of what the future may bring for robotic and artificial intelligence breakthroughs. Very strongly recommended to all students of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and relevant technological advancements, Robots Unlimited gives its readers a complete and expert analysis and collection of such a popular and innovative science.

Throughout the last five decades, fed by both curiosity and military requirements, the design and construction of robots has occupied the time of many researchers, and involved the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars. In this book the author presents an overview of robotics for a semi-popular audience, beginning with a fairly detailed summary of the early history of artificial intelligence. It should be remembered that robotics is but one subfield of artificial intelligence, and that the latter field encompasses much more than the building of humanoid-looking machines. And interestingly, when one compares the research forty or even fifty years ago with what is going on at the present time, it is readily apparent that the differences are more of quality rather than quantity.

But intelligent machines do not have to take the form of humanoid robots. Hollywood and science fiction novels are partly responsible for this attitude, as are the philosophers, who insist upon the Turing test as being a genuine test for machine intelligence. It is evident when reading the book, especially the last part, that the author will not be convinced of the existence of intelligent machines until they do most, if not all, of the things that humans do. This includes the ability to make love, the ability to reproduce, the possession of legal rights, the possession of consciousness, and the ability to feel emotion and fall in love. A machine taking the form of a humanoid robot that was able to do all of things would certainly qualify as being intelligent. But there are many other types of machines, some of which exists today and are working in the field, that qualify as being intelligent, even though it is a different type of intelligence than what most humans are used to (or would acknowledge as such).

This observation raises another issue that is noticeably lacking in this book, as well as in the history of artificial intelligence in general. This issue involves the adoption of a quantitative definition of machine intelligence that will allow its measurement. If one is to judge the progress in artificial intelligence, it is necessary to define criteria, possibly informal, for assessing to what degree one machine is more intelligent or of higher quality than another. The criteria must also be able to distinguish an intelligent from a non-intelligent machine. The Turing test is not entirely suitable as a criterion, since it emphasizes, somewhat myopically and exclusively, human intelligence as being the most objective measure.

After careful study of the history of artificial intelligence, in this book and many others, as well as research papers, and through the development and practical use of `algorithms' that are deemed to be intelligent in some way, this reviewer arrived at an informal classification scheme for intelligent machines. Sometimes this scheme allows the quantitative measurement of machine intelligence, a `machine IQ' if you will, but usually it classifies machines according to what they can do, and to the degree that the machines require assistance from another machine (human or not).

For example, one could label a machine `Type-1' if it is an ordinary calculating machine, unable to learn or check its answers, or unaware of its environment. Type-1 machines are uninteresting from the standpoint of artificial intelligence research. A `Type-2' machine can find answers to domain-specific problems and check these answers according to standards given to it from another machine. Type-2 machines essentially need `tutors' or some kind of assistance to evaluate or continue learning. The chess playing machines described in this book, such as Deep Blue and Deep Thought, could be classified as Type-2 machines. The Pinkerton music-creating machine is also Type-2 as are the rule-based music-creating machines discussed in the book.

`Type-3' machines are able to check their answers to domain-specific problems and make judgments as to the quality of these answers, and do independently of any external standards. The Samuel checkers playing machine and the NeuroGammon and TD-Gammon backgammon playing machines described in this book could be classified as Type-3 machines, as would the `metagame' machines that can learn how to play a game given only the rules. Also Type-3 is the bridge-playing COBRA machine, and the Poki poker-playing machine, the Thaler Creativity Machine, the BRUTUS storytelling machine, all of which are discussed in the book.

A `Type-4' machine is one that is able to judge the quality of its answers to domain-specific problems and then propose theories or explanations that subsume these problems. Type-4 machines are thus machines that one could use to conduct scientific research for example. The EMI music-making machine discussed in the book is a Type-4 machine, due to its ability to analyze the structure of the music presented to it, and then extract the composer's style from it. Type-4 machines have been used in automated drug discovery, although this use is not discussed in this book.

Next are the `Type-5' machines, which are able to solve problems in more than one domain, but with their interest in solving these problems is instigated by an external inquirer, i.e. they do not possess any innate curiosity. The `commonsense reasoning' machines of Cycorp, Inc, which are discussed in the book, are examples of Type-5 machines. It is their ability to solve problems in more than one domain that makes Type-5 machines of great interest to many in the artificial intelligence community. Many in fact do not believe a machine is truly intelligent unless it can think in more than one domain.

A `Type-6' machine can express curiosity and creativity, can solve problems without any external instigation, and can develop theories or explanations around these problems. The author discusses several types of machines in the book that could be classified as Type-6, if one omitted the ability to find solutions without being instigated by an external machine or human.

Lastly, there are `Type-7' machines, which can self-manage and self-replicate, and are also Type-6. Self-replication is discussed in the book, but there are no machines to date that are Type-7.

I've been collecting shells for many years but i never thought of the complexity and perfection of their patterns! This book describes in a simple way the mechanisms that produce the surface decorations of shells. It takes reader in a fascinating trip in a world of algorithmic shapes and colors!

I came across this book at the Rhode Island School of Design library. As an artist I found it surprising that what I had considered to be just a beautiful pattern was actually an imprint of the pressure and movement of the waves upon the seashell. This insight was very thought provoking for me. Perhaps to biologists this is a normal and natural thing - but for an artist this kind of scientific approach with beautifully illustrated pages is a deeply moving experience. This book will definitely make you think twice about the objects that you take for granted - whether it's visually or scientifically. I strongly recommend this book for those who like intellectual challenges and who like to look at the world with fresh new eyes.

This book describes, using a computer, The geometry involved in the building of seashells and in particular the surface features. It shows the how and why of surface decorations found on several species of Mollusks. This is probably the only book to treat this subject and do so extensively expertly and comprahensively.

I love Steve Grand's writing voice. He not only writes clearly and in a conversational style, but he makes the information both accessible and entertaining!

Yet another excellent book on creating synthetic life from Steve Grand. As always, he uses his unpretentious style and fun wit to keep the reader entertained while at the same time tackling some very complex questions about neuroscience and intelligence.

An excellent read for anyone interested in understanding intelligence and how we might create it in a machine.

With a subtitle of How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps, this is a most interesting book. But you do need to understand two things: One this is not an Android in the sense of what you see on television or in the movies, and Two, while there are twenty chapters in the book, some of them aren't all that easy. ==This is not a description of how to build an android, instead it is some thinking on how some aspects of mental processes might best be implemented using today's electronic technology. He presents some thoughts on how we perceive sound and how our mind processes visual images that are different in both concept and implementation than I've seen before. They certainly seem in conflict with descriptions from other writers. I haven't studied this book enough yet to have formed opinions as to the validity of his views. Sometimes just looking at things a bit differently is enough to open other doors in your mind. At any rate, this makes a very interesting read, and may point some of us in other directions.

This book was a very fun find for me, especially as I live in a more rural area and missed a lot of the "Cyberculture" including most of Mondo 2000's run... Oh, well...

I really liked reading from it, and even now it would be worth a look.

A very 1990 look at the future, but well done withgood graphics. Covers music, fashion, Industry,etc.

If you have read Mondo 2000 before, then nothing in this book will be much of a surprise. In fact in 1998 this book is clearly retro. Still, to the new reader you will find much of the information interesting. The format is basically an A-Z of popular memes and cultural phenomena with a pseudo hypertext interface.
High gloss and flashy. Suitable for a coffee table, but you might want to keep it on your reference shelf.

The theme that Kampis examines in Self-Modifying Systems is the self-generation of information by the nontrivial change (self-modification) of systems. Such a system is a network of many components, which have the property of being able to transform each other and organising themselves into larger components. It is this feature that makes such component systems closed to efficient cause. Component-systems, then, are not algorithmic, but this is not a reversible equation in that component-systems can, Kampis argues, give rise, in fact, to any particular algorithm. Kampis describes the difference as that between known complexity, that is to say complexity-to-be-realised, and unknown complexity, or complexity-to-be-explained. The first of these is relatively easy to realise, the second being impossible in that "a complex operation operating on components and bringing forth yet unknown and unidentified components cannot be described as an algorithm" (Kampis 1991:239).
Component-systems, therefore, have a high degree of creativity, but they also have characteristics that avoid many of the problems that other forms of nonlinear models.Kampis argues that nothing that such a process gives rise to can be predicted before hand, and no identity can be traced back to an origin. From this, Kampis states that the creation thesis emerges. This thesis can be stated in the following way:
The organisation of the world is continually self-creating; this process is at any given stage incomplete. Information about the future is not only inaccessible but does not exist in any form. Creation is a basic and general phenomenon that cannot be explained logically. (Kampis 1991: 258).
Self-creation occurs in the form of self-modification. A system that exhibits creativity, then, has to be continually redefined because, in the course of time, all variables and their interrelations will change in so far as each component is replaced by another. It is a system which will be defined (and constructed) by the very processes it undergoes. (Kampis 1991: 490).
The book unfolds, then, as a wonderfully sophisticated model to account for the very process of change and the important limitations of prediction the process of change implies. This book deserves to be one of the key texts of autopoiesis.

George Kampis follows in the ground breaking tradition of Robert Rosen. Examines the notions of reproduction and construction. His scope is wide and through. A must read for anybody interested in Rosen complexity.

As another reviewer notes, this book will be very helpful to those interested in the complexity research of theoretical biologist Robert Rosen. Whereas Rosen has a tight, highly rigorous focus on his goal in "Life Itself", Kampis paints on a somewhat broader canvas, referencing the work of many other researchers (including Rosen). However, Kampis is similarly detailed and methodical.

Kampis first describes the limits of dynamical models, and state-based approaches, including the limitations inherent in the 'canonical formalism' of mechanics.

He then goes on to introduce 'component-systems'. This is a general formal representation of a system as being composed of some number of components out of an essentially unlimited number of possible components. In component systems, the "rules" for the dynamics of the system are not independent of the components themselves. Self-modifying component systems generate new components and delete others, thereby changing the identity of the system itself. In mathematical terms, a self-modifying system is like a function f that belongs to its own domain and range ("f:f-->f"). The result is that such systems are non-algorithmic, nor are their dynamics describable in a state-based formalism (e.g., Newtonian, Hamiltonian, etc.). This has notable consequences for approaches that attempt to treat such systems as algorithmic, or via modelling their state-based dynamics. By comparison to component systems, cellular automata and similar algorithmic formal systems are entirely trivial.

Kampis devotes many chapters to what I have cursorily mentioned, and there is much, much more in this book that is worth reading. Although there is not alot of math, what is there is important to understand. It would be helpful for the interested reader to generally understand the basic notation of mechanics, first-order differential equations, basic logic, Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, Turing machines, basic set theory, system theory, a modicum of philosophy, and linguistics. Most of these aspects are fairly well-explained, so a diligent reader can pick them up as he goes along.

This is not a book of vague handwaving arguments. It will take some studious effort to read and grasp the concepts and profundity of what he presents. However, it will be well worth the effort, and afterward you will never be able to look at dynamical systems and models, complexity, and self-modifying systems, in the same way.

Although there are alot of similarities between Kampis' and Rosen's works, they are sufficiently distinct in approaches and conclusions that both are well worth reading.

One final note: the "typewriter" font used throughout may be a bit surprising to see in the 21st century, but I found it entirely legible and comfortable once I got used to it.

Teuscher has gathered together a set of thought provoking essays about Turing and the ideas he espoused. The diverse range of the essays is a good reflection of Turing's genius.

The essay on making a self-replicating Turing machine reflects earlier speculations on what might more generally be considered a self-replicating Neumann machine.

There is a palpable sense of loss in the book. Turing died at a relatively young age. What if he had lived decades longer? He could have seen the immense flowering of computing, in hardware and software. With his genius, what other insights might he have given us? If you wish, you can regard the book as speculations into this unknowable.

One of the book's authors, Copeland, has recently edited another book -'The Essential Turing', which has essays by Turing himself, and you may want to look at that text.

This book celebrates the 90th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing by bringing together a large set of essays on topics as diverse and colourful as the work and life of the man himself. Turing's fundamental contributions to computing kick started the modern computing era. However, he also made early and outstanding contributions to artificial intelligence, artificial neural networks, morphogenesis, cryptology and the philosophy of mind. The book touches on all these areas and includes contributions from luminaries such as Martin Davis, Daniel Dennett, Andrew Hodges, Douglas Hofstadter and Ray Kurzweil. The book also contains some essays on contemporary topics related to Turing's work such as the controversial area of so-called hypercomputation. While many of the essays are advanced, the material remains accessible and interesting. Turing had a strikingly original and whimsical imagination - reflecting this, and unlike many books on technical topics, this one includes some of the kind of speculation that is bound to fire the imagination of readers. Will computers outstrip human intelligence, and when might it happen? Will we become more like computers, or will they become more like us? Ninety years on from the birth of Alan Turing such issues are more relevant and pressing than ever, and this book makes an excellent advanced introduction to the breadth of Turing's work.

Penny Baillie-De Byl's ARTIFICIAL LIFE POSSIBILITIES: A STAR TREK PERSPECTIVE examines what the future might bring in creating exceptional artificial environments such as Star Trek has featured. Using Star Trek's innovative concepts as a foundation, artificial intelligence researcher Dr. Penmny Baillie-De Byl considers artificial life forms depicted in the TV series and the state of current technology to consider the potentials behind creating advanced AI systems.

The author has picked an interesting way to examine the state of the art in artificial intelligence. It is an interesting turn around. The originators of the TV series Star Trek looked at the research that was being done and extrapolated this research into their characters. In turn, these characters were looked at by researchers to see how their research might really be carried forward.

In this book, Dr. Penny Baillie-de Byl, an Australian university lecturer has in turned looked at the research being conducted and tied it back to the TV show characters. She looks at androids and at purely projection characters such as those that are generated on the holodeck.

The chapter I liked best was her discussion of the Turing Test, a test Alan Turing devised to determine if a machine could think - (what's think, what's a machine). Have we passed the test yet? Then again, I see some humans once in a while that I don't think could pass the test.

The book holds nearly 500 pages and the text is supported by plenty of usefull illustrations and tables. It covers pacing therapy and the indications for internal defibrillators. Although the space is limited you will find a good discussion of details such as venous access and the various causes of cardiac syncope. The text often gives a historic perspective on the use of leads and generators and it is generally well written. It can be recommended for the clinical cardiologist who is not specially trained in electrophysiology but who needs a better understanding of modern pacing therapy. It is allways a problem to by books on a subject that changes so very fast. But if you need a survey this is the best way to do it. This book deserves to be read accordingly. It is a very nice book.

The book holds nearly 500 pages and the text is supported by plenty of usefull illustrations and tables. It covers pacing therapy and the indications for internal defibrillators. Although the space is limited you will find a good discussion of details such as venous access, the various causes of cardiac syncope and the clinical trials on ICD therapy. The text often gives a historic perspective on the use of leads and generators and it is generally well written. It can be recommended for the clinical cardiologist who is not specially trained in electrophysiology but who needs a better understanding of modern pacing therapy. It is always a problem to buy books on a subject that changes so very fast. But if you need a survey this is the best way to do it. This book deserves to be read accordingly. It is a very nice book.