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	9.0
	Author: James Gleick Excerpt: The science of chaos cuts across traditional scientific disciplines tying together unrelated kinds of wildness and iregularity, from the turbulence of weather to the complicated rhythms of the human heart, from the design of snowflakes to the whorls of windswept desert sands. .: Buy at Amazon.com :. .: Buy at Amazon.co.uk :.

Not the most obvious book to find reviewed on an Artificial Intelligence site, nevertheless as the two fields advance, they seem to be converging closer and closer. Both chaos and artificial intelligence are studying the same thing: complexity from simplicity and simplicity from complexity. Chaos has strange attractors and fractal boundaries, artificial intelligence has cellular automata and emergent behaviour - to name just two examples. Ever since reading War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, I was fascinated by the idea that war has been modelling use turbulent water flow as the base model. Chaos has given me a sufficient background to understand why this was the case.

Chaos is split into very manageable chapters, each covering a specific topic, but all together blending together brilliantly. Gleick chooses a very historical perspective to Chaos, as he takes you through its beginnings with Lorenz and his weather modelling, to the present day ventures and beyond. One thing that I noticed very quickly about Chaos was the lack of mathematical equations. Chaos is intrinsically mathematical, but Gleick presents very little (if any) mathematical backing. While this may please some, it irritated me at times when I wanted to explore things a little further. For example, in the first chapter, Gleick talks about the Lorenz attractor, but never gave the three differential equations that created it. I had to look elsewhere to create my Strange Attraction program. I think Gleick should have taken Penrose's idea of putting the mathematical equations in, but assuming that the reader could not understand them! That is the best of both worlds for the people uninterested and interested in the equations.

Despite this, there was very little else I could fault with the book. Excellent coverage of the interesting parts of chaos, a good historical background and some very interesting ideas for people to follow up. Chaos also includes a large 'Notes' section at the back, allowing you to look up references to continue doing your own work. Chaos also had some interesting diagrams and pictures (although sometimes they didn't relate to the text), and it is the graphically representations of chaos that are so awe-inspiring. Below are some screenshots of my Mandelbrot program and Lorenz program.