After Thought: The Computer Challenge To Human Intelligence

by James Bailey

Overview

Through the first fifty years of the computer revolution, scientists have been trying to program electronic circuits to process information the same way humans do. Doing so has reassured us all that underlying every new computer capability, no matter how miraculously fast or complex, are human thought processes and logic. But cutting-edge computer scientists are coming to see that electronic circuits really are alien, that the difference between the human mind and computer capability is not merely one of degree (how fast), but of kind(how). The author suggests that computers “think” best when their “thoughts” are allowed to emerge from the interplay of millions of tiny operations all interacting with each other in parallel. Why then, if computers bring to the table such very different strengths and weaknesses, are we still trying to program them to think like humans? A work that ranges widely over the history of ideas from Galileo to Newton to Darwin yet is just as comfortable in the cutting-edge world of parallel processing that is at this very moment yielding a new form of intelligence, After Thought describes why the real computer age is just beginning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465007820
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	05/16/1997
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)
Lexile:	1360L (what's this?)

About the Author

James Bailey was a senior manager at Thinking Machines Corporation, where a 64,000 processor parallel supercomputer and a wide range of evolutionary computing algorithms were developed. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

The true electronic revolution has not yet happened, proclaims Bailey. A new breed of computers is emerging, using parallel processing and new mathematics ("intermaths") with exotic names like cellular automata, genetic algorithms and artificial life, which enable computers to continually change their own programs as they compute. Instead of the traditional mathematical vocabulary of numbers, symbols and equations, these computers emphasize emergent patterns, enabling scientists to investigate a world of perpetual novelty. The new computers are being used to analyze the behavior of bird flocks and consumers, to study the human immune system, to make financial decisions and to contour the molecular structure of effective drugs. Freelancer Bailey, a former executive at Thinking Machines Corp., predicts that the new computers will create their own versions of scientific theories and help us fathom biological and cultural evolution as well as the workings of the mind. This is a thoughtful, exciting preview of the dawning age of computing. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Bailey, a former executive at Thinking Machines, the manufacturer of one of the earliest lines of parallel processor computers, argues that computers using parallel processing, as opposed to traditional linear processing, will change the way we understand intelligence. Drawing on stories and examples from Galileo to contemporary thinkers, he seeks to explain why the parallel-processing approach will revolutionize information processing and analysis. Some of his examples and analogies are straightforward and understandable, but too often he makes unclear chronological and conceptual jumps. Part philosophy, part history of science, part computer science history, and part technological prediction, this book is difficult to follow and thus unconvincing. For academic libraries.Hilary Burton, Lawrence Livermore National Lab., Livermore, Cal.

Library Journal

After Thought

After Thought's essential premise is that the old ways of understanding the world are about to be swept away by new mathematical methods called "intermaths", much as the ancients' descriptive, geometry-based understanding was swept away by Newton's analytical approach. By helping us understand the first transition, author James Bailey hopes to provide a conceptual model for the second.

"At first the transition to a new vocabulary does not affect the way we understand the world itself. The epicycles of the moon's behavior, for example, were simply reexpressed with sines and cosines instead of with circles and lines. Soon, however, a change of vocabulary is accompanied by a much deeper change in understanding. Scientists choose underlying fictions that are well-adapted to their vocabulary. Where once they looked up into the sky and saw epicycles, for example, they -- and we -- came to see fields of gravitational force instead." -- After Thought, page 80.

After Thought is at its best in the first two sections, wherein Bailey takes us inside the classical mind and then through the paradigm shift that occurred with the invention of the calculus. The presentation is scholarly yet engrossing, synthesizing concepts and figures from hundreds of years of scientific and philosophical literature, Descartes side by side with Thoreau. The history of how the organization and methods of the human "computers" of yore have been reflected in -- and, indeed, severely constrain -- the design of modern digital computers was new to me and I found it quite interesting.

In the third section of the book, Bailey turns to the "intermaths" and discusses a grab bag of computational techniques and topics including neural nets, genetic algorithms, cellular automata, classifier systems, emergent phenomena, fractals, chaos theory, agents, simulation, and even weather and economic modeling. One particularly interesting passage describes a mechanistic implementation of a neural net using a class of students (page 127-128). The explosion of the Internet and the possibility of integrating the processing power now isolated on a hundred million desktops are also woven into the argument.

In the end, After Thought becomes an appeal to faith. Bailey predicts that the "intermaths" will make current technology and "Cartesian thinking" obsolete, but offers only a muddle of anecdotes to support those prophecies. His discussions of operational hardware are limited to Danny Hillis' "Connection Machine," but that product and its parent corporation Thinking Machines Corporation are now defunct. His most convincing case histories are those that use neural nets, but those do not in fact require any radical changes in how computers are organized, or even rely on parallel computation to be useful.

Are the proponents of the "intermaths" merely fringe players? Or are they visionaries trying to implement brilliant ideas with inappropriate hardware -- like Charles Babbage and the Difference Engine? Only time will tell.--Dr.Dobb's Electronic Review of Computer Books

Ray Duncan