zlacker

One of my earliest exposures to CS was his Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines.

"Communication with Alien Intelligence" is another favorite of mine. The idea of enumerating all possible Turing Machines and looking for ones that do something meaningful is brilliant.

>>ehudla+(OP)
Is the set of all turing machines finite?

>>Igglyb+f2
No, but they can be put in a 1-1 mapping with the integers, making them countably infinite.

>>Igglyb+f2
No, but it only needs to be countable, by my understanding.

>>ehudla+(OP)
It is too bad that his book Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines is out of print.

>>ehudla+(OP)
My father had a book by Minsky which I swiped from his bookshelf and read cover to cover. I can't for the life of me remember the title but looking over his bibliography I think it was this one. This book, if indeed it was this one, had a big impact on my younger self, though I'm ashamed of two things now: 1) I can't remember exactly what it was about it that affected me so, and 2) I don't know where the book is! I do remember the chapters about McCulloch-Pitts artificial neurons and Turing machines and the halting problem. I'd dearly love to find a copy of that book to see if my older self recognises what my younger self saw in it.

>>igravi+na
You can see the ToC here: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1095587

Chapter 3 talks about McCulloch-Pitts.

I remember being impressed with chapter 14 ("very simple bases for computability") as a kid. Finding UTMs with minimal number of states etc. are great riddles. I also fondly remember the discussion of the halting problem and related problems ("does program P output X") in chapter 8. This was my first introduction to this procedure and Minsky made the idea of reducing one problem to another totally straightforward. Many years later I realized that not a few CS students find these ideas confusing.

>>ehudla+md
Neat-o. My searching didn't turn up that link for some reason. Thanking you kindly.

>>gshube+Y4
Very true, but FWIW, it's not too hard to find a copy, whether it's a used dead-tree copy (18 or more available on Amazon.com right now), or a bootleg PDF. The PDF version is on the popular e-book sharing sites.