5 - "The Pattern on the Stone" Opinion & Review

The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work, written by William Daniel Hillis, is a book with the intent to explain both the essential and elaborate concepts of computer science in plain english. "The book moves from Boolean algebra through topics such as information theory, parallel computing, cryptography, algorithms, heuristics, universal computing, Turing machines, and promising technologies such as quantum computing and emergent systems."

This book was a pleasure to read. To be honest, I skimmed around the narrative parts and got to the nitty gritty. In my own personal opinion, I found the chapter regarding algorithms and heuristics the most interesting in the publication. Two main reasons:

1. I had a research project over algorithms, and I--along with my sterling teammates--spent the better part of September going over algorithms and heuristics with a fine-toothed comb.
2. I really find the idea of being able to solve a problem with 100% accuracy fascinating, and I would like to investigate the run time of algorithms with very substantial tasks and find a way to shorten down the amount of time needed for an algorithm (or set of algorithms) to find the perfect solution.

I am also fascinated by heuristics and the science of that method of problem-solving in computers. Heuristic problem-solving/computing stated in the book, compared to algorithms, "almost always gets the right answer." Algorithms may get the answer 100% of the time, but it may take a considerable amount of time. Heuristics cuts that time down immensely, sacrificing optimality or precision. For example, search engines use heuristic methods of finding solutions to what the user is looking for. That's how the suggestions used by Google and Youtube work.

I mostly felt engaged reading this book, especially when I got to algorithms because I knew it would help with my project. But I digress, it was an interesting book with a great way of explaining how computers generally work. Its range of topics was vast and seemed like it wouldn't be easy to understand, but it did its best to make things like artificial intelligence (AI) and image compression easy to understand without omitting information about the topic. One area that felt dry in the book was the topic of Turing Machines. It might just be me, but it didn't match up to the rest of the book in terms of interest.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants to look into how computers work and not have to take several courses on it to understand. It's not very long, ending just after 150 pages. It clearly and concisely explains computer science and other subcategories that go into how these modern marvels work.

"The Pattern on the Stone." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 16 Apr. 2014. Web. 05 Oct. 2015. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pattern_on_the_Stone>.

Hillis, W. Daniel. The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work. New York: Basic, 1998. Print.