Godel Escher Bach apart from being written so well that it won a Pulitzer Prize, was THE most inspiring book I read during the whole of my computer science degree (And I read a few) and raised Douglas Hofstadter to god-like status in my pantheon of idea mongers! Others that kept me going were:
John von Neumann - Computers and the brain Marvin Minsky - The society of mind Aho Sethi and Ulman - The dragon book (cited already) Kraig Brockschmidt - OLE2 Bjarne Stroustrup - The C++ programming Language 3ed+ (Never get an older copy, the indexes were screwed) unknown - the simulation of human behaviour John Koza - Genetic Programming
There are Never enough conceptual books, ones that can inspire with Deep ideas, available in Libraries.
I wonder how wide and how deep Babbage's engine would have had to have been to play Quake? How much petrol/gas/steam/cranking would be needed to run a copy of Linux?
I like this "my computer is smaller and slower than yours" competition. Alas, the nearest I get is to remember the feeling of AWE I felt when confronted with our college's new Research Machines X20 server which had a whopping 20Mb hard drive. Knowing that establishment - it is still in use. All we ever got to use were RM Linxes.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt if such an attack would have been possible without such stuff as PGP.
Isn't life in this case is imitating Spike Milligan, not Monty Python?
Godel Escher Bach apart from being written so well that it won a Pulitzer Prize, was THE most inspiring book I read during the whole of my computer science degree (And I read a few) and raised Douglas Hofstadter to god-like status in my pantheon of idea mongers!
Others that kept me going were:
John von Neumann - Computers and the brain
Marvin Minsky - The society of mind
Aho Sethi and Ulman - The dragon book (cited already)
Kraig Brockschmidt - OLE2
Bjarne Stroustrup - The C++ programming Language 3ed+ (Never get an older copy, the indexes were screwed)
unknown - the simulation of human behaviour
John Koza - Genetic Programming
There are Never enough conceptual books, ones that can inspire with Deep ideas, available in Libraries.
dya ever wonder what an animal that's been tagged feels like...?
I wonder how wide and how deep Babbage's engine would have had to have been to play Quake? How much petrol/gas/steam/cranking would be needed to run a copy of Linux?
I like this "my computer is smaller and slower than yours" competition. Alas, the nearest I get is to remember the feeling of AWE I felt when confronted with our college's new Research Machines X20 server which had a whopping 20Mb hard drive. Knowing that establishment - it is still in use. All we ever got to use were RM Linxes.
Politicians in the UK are widely known for their insightful policy making wrt computing.
cf The decision to not fund or promote AI research.