From Black Holes and Big Bangs to the Higgs boson and the infinitesimal building blocks of all matter, modern science has been spectacularly successful, with one glaring exception — intelligence. Intelligence still remains as one of the greatest mysteries in science.How do you chat so effortlessly? How do you remember, and why do you forget? From a basis of ten maxims What Makes You Clever explains the difficulties as well as the persuasive and persistent over-estimations of progress in Ar...

Managers, business owners, computer literate individuals, software developers, students, and researchers--all are looking for an understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) and what might be in the future. In this literate yet easy-to-read discussion, Derek Partridge explains what artificial intelligence can and cannot do, and what it holds for applications such as banking, financial services, and expert systems of all kinds. Topics include: the strengths and weaknesses of software devel...

Devoid of salacious gossip and groundless speculation, Diana's Boys is the first candid chronicle of the world's two most celebrated royals-and far more.

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains. If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our...

**Recommended by Bill GatesA thought-provoking and wide-ranging exploration of machine learning and the race to build computer intelligences as flexible as our own**In the world's top research labs and universities, the race is on to invent the ultimate learning algorithm: one capable of discovering any knowledge from data, and doing anything we want, before we even ask. In The Master Algorithm, Pedro Domingos lifts the veil to give us a peek inside the learning ma...

This landmark 1971 classic is reprinted with a new preface, chapter-by-chapter commentary, and straight-from-the-heart observations on topics that affect the professional life of programmers.Long regarded as one of the first books to pioneer a people-oriented approach to computing, The Psychology of Computer Programming endures as a penetrating analysis of the intelligence, skill, teamwork, and problem-solving power of the computer programmer.Finding the chapters strikingly...

"A supremely enjoyable, intoxicating work." —NatureHow did we come to have minds? For centuries, poets, philosophers, psychologists, and physicists have wondered how the human mind developed its unrivaled abilities. Disciples of Darwin have explained how natural selection produced plants, but what about the human mind?In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Daniel C. Dennett builds on recent discoveries from biology and computer science to show...

Software architecture—the conceptual glue that holds every phase of a project together for its many stakeholders—is widely recognized as a critical element in modern software development. Practitioners have increasingly discovered that close attention to a software system’s architecture pays valuable dividends. Without an architecture that is appropriate for the problem being solved, a project will stumble along or, most likely, fail. Even with a superb architecture, if that architecture i...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Bold futurist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near, offers a framework for envisioning the future of machine intelligence—“a book for anyone who wonders where human technology is going next” (The New York Times Book Review).“Kurzweil offers a thought-provoking analysis of human and artificial intelligence and a unique look at a future in which the capabilities of the computer and the species that invented i...

This third volume of the best-selling "Data Model Resource Book" series revolutionizes the data modeling discipline by answering the question "How can you save significant time while improving the quality of any type of data modeling effort?" In contrast to the first two volumes, this new volume focuses on the fundamental, underlying patterns that affect over 50 percent of most data modeling efforts. These patterns can be used to considerably reduce modeling time and cost, to jump-start da...

This book discusses how model-based approaches can improve the daily practice of software professionals. This is known as Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) or, simply, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE).MDSE practices have proved to increase efficiency and effectiveness in software development, as demonstrated by various quantitative and qualitative studies. MDSE adoption in the software industry is foreseen to grow exponentially in the near future, e.g., due to the convergence ...

Combining ideas from philosophy, artificial intelligence, and neurobiology, Daniel Dennett leads the reader on a fascinating journey of inquiry, exploring such intriguing possibilities as: Can any of us really know what is going on in someone else's mind? What distinguishes the human mind from the minds of animals, especially those capable of complex behavior? If such animals, for instance, were magically given the power of language, would their communities evolve an intelligence as subtly...