Mirror Worlds Bok

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• Text 27345, v1

Omfång

23x16 cm

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Innehåll

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List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Notes on the Figures

Prologue

1. Mirror Worlds?

Sounds Like Fun, But So What?
1791
This Book

2. The Orb

Into the Mirror World
The Significance of Mirrir Worlds
Significance, I: Getting a Grip
The hospital, for example
The Ensemble
Significance, II: The New Public Square
Building Mirror Worlds
Significance, III: Seeing the Whole
Adding it all up

3. Disembodied Machines

A Machine?
Embodied Machines
The Design Process
So: What kind of machine?
The Computational Landscape
An Example
Building Info-structures
Organizing Space and Time -
Details: How Procedures Work
The Shape of Computational spacetime
The Embodiment (Mere Hardware

4. Space, Time and Multi-time

What is an ensamble?
What is asynchronous?
So what?
Concretely...
The Bottom Line
What do ensambles look like?
So you have a group of information machines...
Simple Machines for Coordination
Down to Earth
Hypercomputers
Implications I: Nature
Implications II: Communication

5. The Deluge

The Problem
What data?
Software Architectures (em>Architectures?)
The Design of REal Time Knowledge Plants
The Noisiest Ensamble
Why do it this way?
Espalier
The Intensive Care Unit Prototype
There's more to it, of course...
Implications
Nerves
Turingware
True Bigness
In Sum

6. Simple Mind Machines

The Goal: Finding Precedents
What Precedents? What Comments?
For Example -
The Raw Material
...And Its Implications
So what about speculation?
The Basic Operations
Implications of Plunge and Squish
Achieving Distraction
The Basic Cycle
Squishing and Its Consequences
The Software Architecture
Implications I: The Ultimate Reference Room
Implications II: Understanding Language (?)
Implications III: The Mind Spectrum
Conclusions

7. Building Mirror Worlds

Facts vs. Forecasts
The Urge...
Why?
The Basic Design
The Agent Space
The Chronicles
The Recursive Free-Form Dollhouse
For Example
In Sum
Epilouge

Notes

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Baksidan

• Text 27347, v1

Imagine looking at your computer screen and seeing realityÄan image of your city, for instance, complete with moving traffic patterns, or a picture that sketches the state of an entire corporation at this second. These representations are called Mirror Worlds, and according to David Gelernter they will soon be available to everyone. Mirror Worlds are high-tech voodoo dolls: by interacting with the images, you interact with reality. Indeed, Mirror Worlds will revolutionize the use of computers, transforming them from (mere) handy tools to crystal balls which will allow us to see the world more vividly and see into it more deeply.

In this fascinating book Gelernter takes us on a guided tour of the computer technology of the near future. Mirror Worlds, he contends, will allow us to explore the world in unprecedented depth and detail without leaving the comfort of home. And he doesn'tjust speculate about how this amazing new software will be usedÄhe shows us how it will be made, explaining carefully and in detail how to build a Mirror World using technology already available.

Gelernter handles these highly abstract concepts with flair.... Studiously playful....A highly edifying book on the whole world of computers. For anyone who has wondered what the next stage of the computer revolution will be like and how it will enrich our lives considerably more than the availability of word processors and calculators has, Mirror Worlds offers some answers.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

The future of the computer, and of all of us, is perhaps printed on these pages.

Jon Kartman, Booklist

David Gelernteris Associate Professor of Computer Science at Yale University and an expert in programming languages and methods, and in artificial intelligence.