After Digital

Computation as Done by Brains and Machines
Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-935778-9
Verlag: OXFORD UNIV PR

Buch, Englisch, 400 Seiten, Format (B × H): 183 mm x 260 mm, Gewicht: 937 g

Current computer technology doubles in in power roughly every two years, an increase called "Moore's Law. " This constant increase is predicted to come to an end soon. Digital technology will change. Although digital computers dominate today's world, there are alternative ways to "compute", which might be better and more efficient than digital computation. After Digital looks at where the field of computation began and where it might be headed, and offers predictions about a collaborative future relationship between human cognition and mechanical computation.

James A. Anderson, a pioneer of biologically inspired neural nets, presents two different kinds of computation-digital and analog--and gives examples of their history, function, and limitations. A third, the brain, falls somewhere in between these two forms, and is suggested as a computer architecture that is more capable of performing some specific important cognitive tasks-perception, reasoning, and intuition, for example- than a digital computer, even though the digital computer is constructed from far faster and more reliable basic elements. Anderson discusses the essentials of brain hardware, in particular, the cerebral cortex, and how cortical structure can influence the form taken by the computational operations underlying cognition. Topics include association, understanding complex systems through analogy, formation of abstractions, the biology of number and its use in arithmetic and mathematics, and computing across scales of organization. These applications, of great human interest, also form the goals of genuine artificial intelligence. After Digital will appeal to a broad cognitive science community, including computer scientists, philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, as well as the curious science layreader, and will help to understand and shape future developments in computation.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Anderson, James A.

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychotherapie / Klinische Psychologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychologie / Allgemeines & Theorie Psychologie: Allgemeines
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Kognitionspsychologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychologie / Allgemeines & Theorie Psychologische Theorie, Psychoanalyse Humanistische Psychologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Biologische Psychologie, Neuropsychologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Preface

- Chapter 1: The Past of the Future of Computation

- Chapter 2: Computing Hardware: Analog

- Chapter 3: Computing Hardware: Digital

- Chapter 4: Software: Making a Digital Computer Do Something Useful

- Chapter 5: Human Understanding of Complex Systems

- Chapter 6: An Engineer's Introduction to Neuroscience

- Chapter 7: The Brain Works by Logic

- Chapter 8: The Brain Doesn't Work by Logic

- Chapter 9: Association

- Chapter 10: Cerebral Cortex: Basics

- Chapter 11: Cerebral Cortex: Columns and Collaterals

- Chapter 12: Brain Theory: History

- Chapter 13: Brain Theory: Constraints

- Chapter 14: Programming

- Chapter 15: Brain Theory: Numbers

- Chapter 16: Return to Cognitive Science

- Chapter 17: Loose Ends: Biological and Artificial

- Chapter 18: The Near Future

- Chapter 19: Apotheosis: Yes! Or No?

- Notes

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

James A. Anderson has been a member of the faculty of Brown University since 1973 and is now Professor in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences. He received an SB in physics and PhD in physiology both from MIT. He has published extensively in the area of computational models for cognition and memory and computational neuroscience.