Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 The Red Queen’s Race
2 The Exponential Nature of Technology
3 From Maxwell to the Internet
4 The Universal Machine
5 The Quest for Intelligent Machines
6 Cells, Bodies, and Brains
7 Biology Meets Computation
8 How the Brain Works
9 Understanding the Brain
10 Brains, Minds, and Machines
11 Challenges and Promises
12 Speculations
Further Reading
References
Index

List of Tables

Table 3.1 A truth table for logic function nand.
Table 3.2 Logic functions for the addition of two binary digits. C gives the value of the result bit; Cout gives the result of the carry bit.
Table 4.1 Differences used by the Difference Engine.
Table 4.2 Lists of natural and even numbers, in one-to-one correspondence.
Table 4.3 Lists of natural and rational numbers, in one-to-one correspondence.
Table 4.4 Hypothetical lists of natural and real numbers, in one-to-one correspondence.
Table 4.5 Execution times for algorithms of varying complexity. Here ∞ stands for times that are longer than the age of the universe.
Table 5.1 Learning instances.
Table 5.2 Hypothetical decision problem for early humans.

List of Illustrations

Figure 3.1 The origin of the world according to Oliver Heaviside’s reformulation of Maxwell’s equations and a popular T shirt.
Figure 3.2 An electrical circuit consisting of a capacitor, a resistor, and a voltage source.
Figure 3.3 (a) A nand gate made of MOSFET transistors. (b) The logic symbol for a nand gate.
Figure 3.4 Exclusive-or and majority gates made of nand gates.
Figure 3.5 Adding together the numbers 0111₂ and 0010₂.
Figure 3.6 (a) A single-bit adder. (b) A four-bit adder, shown adding the numbers 0111 and 0010 in binary..
Figure 3.7 Evolution of the number of transistors of Intel microprocessors.
Figure 3.8 Evolution of the number of users of the Internet.
Figure 3.9 Evolution of the number of articles in Wikipedia.
Figure 4.1 A part of the Analytical Engine now on exhibition at the Science Museum in London.
Figure 4.2 A Turing machine that writes an infinite succession of zeroes and ones with spaces in between.
Figure 4.3 Von Neumann architecture of a stored-program computer.
Figure 4.4 A Turing machine that accepts the language L₁.
Figure 4.5 An illustration of the equivalence between infinite strings of zeroes and ones and languages defined over an alphabet.
Figure 4.6 Illustration of the Post Correspondence Problem, known to be undecidable.
Figure 4.7 A graph of the distances between French cities.
Figure 4.8 The minimum spanning tree for the graph in figure 4.7.
Figure 4.9 A drawing (by Leonhard Euler) and a graph representation of the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem.
Figure 5.1 A graphical depiction of table 5.1, using the temperature and wind attributes. Triangles represent days that are good for playing tennis and circles represent the other days.
Figure 5.2 A decision tree for the tennis problem.
Figure 5.3 A diagram of a perceptron.
Figure 5.4 Boundaries for two different problems. Only the problem shown in diagram a can be obtained by a perceptron, which implements a linear function of the inputs.
Figure 5.5 A diagram of a multi-layer perceptron with an input layer, a middle layer, and a output layer.
Figure 6.1 The structure of the double helix of the DNA molecule, in which A-T and C-G base pairing creates the redundancy needed for DNA duplication when cells split or organisms reproduce. Drawing by Richard Wheeler (2011), reproduced with permission; also available at Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 6.2 The standard genetic code. Each codon is composed of three bases and encodes one amino acid.
Figure 6.3 A phylogenetic tree of life based on genomic data. Source: Woese 1990 (available at Wikimedia Commons).
Figure 6.4 Simplified views of eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells (NCBI 2007).
Figure 6.5 The structure of the human 80S ribosome (Anger et al. 2013), from the Protein Data Bank (Berman et al. 2000). Drawn using Jmol (Herraez 2006).
Figure 6.6 The tertiary structure of the protein 1R69p.
Figure 7.1 A graph comparing sequencing costs with Moore’s Law, based on data compiled by the National Human Genome Research Institute. Values are in US dollars per DNA base.
Figure 7.2 DNA sequencing from reads, using Eulerian paths. The reads on the right are used to label the edges on the graph. Two nodes are connected, if they have labels contained in the read that is used to label the edge that connects them.
Figure 8.1 A drawing of Purkinje cells (A) and granule cells (B) in the cerebellum of a pigeon by Santiago Ramón y Cajal.
Figure 8.2 (a) A schematic diagram of a neuron by Nicolas Rougier (2007), available at Wikimedia Commons. (b) A real neuron from layer 4 of the primary visual area of a mouse brain, reconstructed and made available by the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Little circles at the end of dendrites mark locations where the reconstruction stopped, while the larger circle marks the location of the soma.
Figure 8.3 An electrical diagram of a simplified model of a patch of neuron membrane.
Figure 8.4 Simplified models of patches of neuron membrane interconnected by axial conductances.
Figure 8.5 A complete electrical diagram of Hodgkin and Huxley’s model of a patch of neuron membrane of a pyramidal neuron.
Figure 8.6 A simulation of the electrical behavior of a pyramidal neuron.
Figure 8.7 A diagram of the Brodmann areas reprinted from Ranson and Saunders 1920. (a) Lateral surface. (b) Medial surface.
Figure 8.8 Neural pathways involved in the first phases of image processing by the brain.
Figure 9.1 A schematic depiction of the decay process by which a fluorine-18 nucleus leads to the production of two high-energy photons (drawing not to scale).
Figure 9.2 An illustration of how protons, oscillating at frequencies that depend on the strength of the magnetic field, make it possible to determine the precise locations of hydrogen atoms.
Figure 9.3 Images of brain slices obtained with magnetic-resonance imaging.
Figure 9.4 DTI reconstruction of tracts of brain fiber that run through the mid-sagittal plane. Image by Thomas Schultz (2006), available at Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 9.5 A model of the magnetically shielded room built by David Cohen in 1969 at MIT for the first magnetoencephalography experiments. Photo taken at Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging.
Figure 9.6 A brain network obtained by considering the highest correlations among 124 different regions of interest in an average of nine human subjects.
Figure 9.7 A rendering of one cylindrical volume of neocortex, roughly 8 µm in diameter and 20 µm long, obtained from the reconstruction performed by Kasthuri et al. (2015). Reprinted with permission from Narayanan Kasthuri.
Figure 10.1 Digital and biological minds, natural and synthetic.
Figure 10.2 The final position of a game of Go, with the territories defined.

Guide

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