[computer-go] What is Thought? Book Announcement

[Eric Baum <ebaum@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

What is Thought?
Eric B. Baum

MIT Press January 2004

In What Is Thought? Eric Baum proposes a computational explanation of 
thought. Just as Erwin Schrodinger in his classic 1944 work What Is Life?
argued ten years before the discovery of DNA that life must be 
explainable at a fundamental level by physics and chemistry, Baum 
contends that the present-day inability of computer science to explain
thought and meaning is no reason to doubt there can be such an 
explanation. Baum argues that the complexity of mind is the outcome 
of evolution, which has built thought processes that act unlike the 
standard algorithms of computer science and that to understand the 
mind we need to understand these thought processes and the
evolutionary process that produced them in computational terms. 

Baum proposes that underlying mind is a complex but compact program that 
corresponds to the underlying structure of the world. He argues
further that the mind is essentially programmed by DNA. We learn more 
rapidly than computer scientists have so far been able to explain 
because the DNA code has programmed the mind to deal only with 
meaningful possibilities. Thus the mind understands by exploiting 
semantics, or meaning, for the purposes of computation; constraints 
are built in so that although there are myriad possibilities, only 
a few make sense. Evolution discovered corresponding subroutines or 
shortcuts to speed up its processes and to construct creatures whose 
survival depends on making the right choice quickly. Baum argues that 
the structure and nature of thought, meaning, sensation, and 
consciousness therefore arise naturally from the evolution of programs
that exploit the compact structure of the world.

An important part of this exposition is to describe how understanding
is equivalent to computationally exploiting the underlying structure 
of problems. The games of CHESS and GO, for example, have huge state 
spaces -- there are many possible arrangements of the pieces -- 
yet are defined by relatively compact sets of rules, giving them 
structure. To gain insight into such questions, *What is Thought?* 
discusses the approaches of computer science programs (such as Deep 
Blue and more recent chess programs based on search and evaluate), 
artificial intelligence programs (such as PARADISE for chess and 
the expert system approach to Go), as well as the thought processes 
of humans and the computations of evolved programs on a variety of 
problems. New techniques for evolutionary computing are described 
and shown to result in surprising, human like performance on problems 
such as Rubik's cube and some planning problems that foil AI 
approaches yet have human-exploitable structure.

-----------------------------------------------
Best price right now is at Barnesandnoble.com (BN.com) $32, with free shipping.

To buy this book:
Barnes and Noble.com: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=2WI405VPJU&isbn=0262025485&itm=17

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0262025485/qid=1074532277/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/002-6265544-0286451?v=glance&s=books

MIT Press: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?sid=AF8A6531-E5E9-4710-A781-CA47C6B64621&ttype=2&tid=9978


---------------------------------------
>From the back cover:
 
"This book is the deepest, and at the same time the most commonsensical, 
approach to the problem of mind and thought that I have read.  The approach 
is from the point of view of computer science, yet Baum has no illusions 
about the progress which has been made within that field. He presents the 
many technical advances which have been made -- the book will be enormously 
useful for this aspect alone -- but refuses to play down their glaring 
inadequacies. He also presents a road map for getting further and makes the 
case that many of the apparently 'deep' philosophical problems such as free 
will may simply evaporate when one gets closer to real understanding."
--Philip W. Anderson, Joseph Henry Professor of Physics, Princeton 
University, 1977 Nobel Laureate in Physics

"Eric Baum's book is a remarkable achievement. He presents a novel thesis 
-- that the mind is a program whose components are semantically meaningful 
modules -- and explores it with a rich array of evidence drawn from a 
variety of fields. Baum's argument depends on much of the intellectual core 
of computer science, and as a result the book can also serve as a short 
course in computer science for non-specialists. To top it off, *What is 
Thought?* is beautifully written and will be at least as clear and 
accessible to the intelligent lay public as *Scientific American*."
--David Waltz, Director, Center for Computational Learning Systems, 
Columbia University

"What's great about this book is the detailed way in which Baum shows the 
explanatory power of a few ideas, such as compression of information, the 
mind and DNA as computer programs, and various concepts in computer science 
and learning theory such as simplicity, recursion, and position evaluation. 
*What is Thought?* is a terrific book, and I hope it gets the wide 
readership it deserves."
--Gilbert Harman, Department of Philosophy, Princeton University

"There is no problem more important, or more daunting, than discovering the 
structure and processes behind human thought. *What is Thought?* is an 
important step towards finding the answer. A concise summary of the 
progress and pitfalls to date gives the reader the context necessary to 
appreciate Baum's important insights into the nature of cognition."
--Nathan Myhrvold, Managing Director, Intellectual Ventures, and former 
Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft
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