The discrete charm of the machine : why the world became digital /
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Princeton, New Jersey :
Princeton University Press,
[2019]
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
Table of Contents:
- Part I : A Cenury of Valves
- 1. The discrete revolution. My golden age of garbage ; Nostalgia and the aesthetics of technology ; Some terminology
- 2. What's wrong with analog?. Signals and noise ; Reproduction and storage ; The origins of noise ; Thermal noise in electronics ; Other noise in electronics ; Digital immunity ; Analog rot ; Caveats
- 3 Signal standardization. A reminiscence ; Ones and zeros ; Directivity of control ; Gates ; The electron ; Edison's lightbulb problems ; De Forest's audion ; The vacuum tube as valve ; The rest of logic ; Clocks and doorbells ; Memory ; Other ways to build valves
- 4 Consequential physics. When physics became discrete ; The absolute size of things ; The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle ; Explaining wave-particle duality ; The Pauli exclusion principle ; Atomic physics ; Semiconductors ; The P-N junction ; The transistor ; Quantum tunneling ; Speed
- 5 Your computer is a photograph. Room at the bottom ; The computer as microphotograph ; Heisenberg in the chip foundry ; Moore's law and the time of silicon: ca. 1960-? The exponential wall
- Part II : Sound and Pictures
- 6 Music from bits. The monster in 1957 ; A chance encounter with a D-to-A converter ; Sampling and Monsieur Fourier ; Nyquist's sampling principle ; Another win for digital ; Another isomorphism
- 7. Communication in a noisy world. Claude Shannon's 1948 paper ; Measuring information ; Entropy ; Noisy channels ; Coding ; The noisy coding theorem ; Another win for digital
- Part III : Computation
- 8. Analog computers. From the Ancient Greeks ; More ingenious devices ; Deeper questions ; Computing with soap films ; Local and global ; Differential equations ; Integration ; Lord Kelvin's research program ; The electronic analog computer
- 9 Turing's machine. The ingredients of a Turing machine ; The all-analog machine ; The partly digital computer ; A reminiscence: The stored-program loom in New Jersey ; Monsieur Jacquard's loom ; Charles Babbage ; Babbage's analytical engine ; Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace ; Turing's abstraction
- 10 Intrinsic difficulty. Being robust ; The polynomial/exponential dichotomy ; Turing equivalence ; Two important problems ; Problems with easily checked certificates (NP) ; Reducing one problem to another ; Yes/No problems ; Cook's theorem: 3-SAT is NP-complete ; Thousands more NP-complete problems
- 11 Searching for magic. Analog attacks on NP-complete problems ; The missing law ; The Church-Turing thesis ; The extended Church-Turing thesis ; Locality: From Einstein to Bell ; Behind the quantum curtain ; Quantum hacking ; The power of quantum computers ; Life itself ; The uncertain limits of computation
- Part IV : Today and Tomorrow
- 12 The Internet, then the robots. Ideas ; The Internet: Packets, not circuits ; The Internet: Photons, not electrons ; Enter artificial intelligence ; Deep learning ; Obstacles ; Enter robots ; The problem of consciousness ; The question of values.