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	8.7
	Author: George Dyson Excerpt: A very good book about life's grand project after animals: machines ... At times ironically resigned to the notion of progress, at others enthused and engaged, it reads as though the poet Robert Frost had popped Ecstasy in the company of Alan Turing .: Buy at Amazon.com :. .: Buy at Amazon.co.uk :.

The above description of the book just about sums it up as well as one can. Reading this book was as thought provoking as The Emperor's New Mind in a third of the space. The book reads like no other, intelligently woven with quotes from authors dating centuries back to modern literature. The book doesn't focus so much on Artificial Life as one might think from a book with such a title. Instead, it deals more with the convergance of nature, man and technology.

An incredible part of this book is how Dyson gets his ideas subtly across. He allows the reader to sit back and think what the future might hold - instead of predicting or foretelling the future Kurzweil-style, he simply shows you facts (with a few fables thrown in) and allows the reader to come to their own conclusions.

A good portion of the book shows you the intimate coalition that the computing industy and the military had from the conception of the computer through to modern day networking (like the World-wide Web). Yet unlike DeLanda, Dyson focuses more on the history of the computer and how the ideas of creating life within a computer are as old the computer itself. He details the experiments of Barricelli who evolved agents on the IAS computer (the same computer that crunched all the numbers for the atomic bomb tests).

Dyson talks at length also about von Neumann and his contribution to the modern-day computer and the associated sciences. One of my favourite quotes in the book is:

"...Of von Neumann's creations, it is the computers that exploded, not the bombs..." - p.92

All of Dyson's talk of crytology, war and the other topics he touches upon all centre around two main topics - communication and distributed intelligence. He shows how necessary these two concepts are, and how our society has evolved just the same as any other natural system in its use of communications and distributed intelligence. This is very similar to DeLanda's analogy to the different military strategies used over the centuries - the current strategy being the distributed network analogy.

To top all of this, the 228-page book has a 57-page notes and index section, so that the reader may cross-reference, follow-up or browse the book's topics at their own leisure. I find this a must for any academic book, especially within the field of Artificial Intelligence. Overall, I've not read such a stimulating book in a long time - my interest has once again been sparked in distributed intelligence and self-organizing systems. I thoroughly recommend this book to academics and hobbyists alike.