Reviews for The computational beauty of nature

The average rating for The computational beauty of nature based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-19 00:00:00 Natalie Lamere I was somewhat disappointed by this book. Maybe 15 years ago the ideas presented here were radical and surprising, but now they're old hat. Much of the material is stuff that will be familiar to anyone who took intro level math and CS classes in college-- computability, lambda calculus, Godel's theorem, etc. The sections on fractals, cellular automata, neural nets, etc. cover well-trodden ground. There are better books if you want to delve deep into these subjects, and at a superficial level it's stuff you've already seen popularized elsewhere. The biggest surprise to me was how little nature this book actually contains. There is certainly some-- fractal geometry in ferns, flocking of birds, emergent behavior in ants-- but much of the book is just theoretical discussion of the aforementioned math/CS topics. I guess it's a sign of how much this whole area of inquiry succeeded, that it all seems rote today! We've played Sim-Ant and Sim City, fooled around with Mandelbrot sets in Javascript, seen machine learning practically applied all over the place. All par for the course. If you're interested in fractals specifically, try Fractals Everywhere. If you're interested in complex systems, criticality, and general applications of computation/math to nature, I highly recommend the Princeton Companion to Mathematics. It's a more modern take on these topics. If you're the kind of person who would read The Computational Beauty of Nature, you will definitely enjoy the Princeton Companion. Check it out!

Review # 2 was written on 2014-05-10 00:00:00 Joe Fill An introduction to several strands of mathematics and computer science which have parallels in nature and biology. The topics covered include: + Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem + Fractals + Chaos + Cellular Automata + Genetic Algorithms Because of the breadth of topics, the subject matter is sometimes treated fairly lightly. Although this sort of introductory treatment was exactly what I wanted, I occasionaly found the explanations to be too hand-wavy, especially some of the philosophical asides. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading this book very much. It's probably the only book that combines all of these topics into one comprehensive volume. The book has its own website with source code for the programs used to investigate the various subjects.