The Discrete Charm of the Machine
Why the World Became Digital
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- € 18,99
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- € 18,99
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The genesis of the digital idea and why it transformed civilization
A few short decades ago, we were informed by the smooth signals of analog television and radio; we communicated using our analog telephones; and we even computed with analog computers. Today our world is digital, built with zeros and ones. Why did this revolution occur? The Discrete Charm of the Machine explains, in an engaging and accessible manner, the varied physical and logical reasons behind this radical transformation.
The spark of individual genius shines through this story of innovation: the stored program of Jacquard’s loom; Charles Babbage’s logical branching; Alan Turing’s brilliant abstraction of the discrete machine; Harry Nyquist’s foundation for digital signal processing; Claude Shannon’s breakthrough insights into the meaning of information and bandwidth; and Richard Feynman’s prescient proposals for nanotechnology and quantum computing. Ken Steiglitz follows the progression of these ideas in the building of our digital world, from the internet and artificial intelligence to the edge of the unknown. Are questions like the famous traveling salesman problem truly beyond the reach of ordinary digital computers? Can quantum computers transcend these barriers? Does a mysterious magical power reside in the analog mechanisms of the brain? Steiglitz concludes by confronting the moral and aesthetic questions raised by the development of artificial intelligence and autonomous robots.
The Discrete Charm of the Machine examines why our information technology, the lifeblood of our civilization, became digital, and challenges us to think about where its future trajectory may lead.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Steiglitz (Snipers, Shills, and Sharks: eBay and Human Behavior), professor emeritus of computer science at Princeton, falls far short of his stated goal explaining the development of "devices that store and manipulate information in the form of discrete bits" in a manner accessible to technically untrained readers. Instead, Steiglitz offers a jargon-laced and sometimes eccentric history of the computer that will confound even those with some scientific literacy. His opening section summarizing the material he will cover is much clearer than anything that follows he refers to "physical obstacles to reliable computation" and how these challenges are overcome digitally; how ideas that emerged from communication studies, rather than physics, yielded "high-speed networking and the internet"; and what the full potential of quantum computing might be. But even here, with an unexplained reference to "an NP-complete problem," Steiglitz betrays his disconnect from his intended audience. And that divergence only grows, through complex diagrams, and obscure phrasing ("every time we multiply a sinusoid by an additional sinusoid, we double the number of frequencies in the signal"). The bizarre epilogue, an imagined intercepted alien message, also fails to render complex concepts more relatable. A more stringent editorial hand might have made Steiglitz's undoubted expertise in his subject genuinely accessible to layreaders.