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The Strangest Book on the Theory of Computation (2009)
- jamesrcole 8y agoGiven their assessment of the book, I don't see what the point was in even bringing it up in the first place.
- theoh 8y agoIt's an oddity. How did it get published? How does the author manage to maintain a professional career? NB the person writing the blog had bought a copy, so it's effectively a warning—and a negative review. Nothing inexplicable about that.
- ebullientocelot 8y agoI tried googling around for Matthew Simon and couldn't find anything, even with San Jose State University added to the search terms (found from "Look Inside" on Amazon for the book--worth a look by itself). I'm a bit disappointed, was hoping for a zany blog or old school static site to enjoy.
- booleandilemma 8y agoIf you’re in the mood for something zany and tech related there’s always Fabian Pascal: http://www.dbdebunk.com/2018/07/lenin-trotsky-data-management-and.html?m=1 http://www.dbdebunk.com/2018/07/lenin-trotsky-data-managemen...
- jamesrcole 8y agoFWIW, the reason it didn't seem to me worth mentioning is that it seems the kind of book that no-one would get unless they'd seen it recommended.
- theoh 8y agoThe author of the blog post bought it based on a description in a catalog, so evidently it seemed promising enough at least to them, and by the same token, worth reporting on. So there's no mystery about why the blog author felt it was worth making this post. Curiosity value aside, buying an advanced textbook on spec based on the specific topics it promises to cover doesn't seem that uncommon, particularly if you are somehow isolated.
- jamesrcole 8y agoIMO hardly anyone is going to purchase or even pay attention to something unless they've seen some positive recommendations for it. In a world of information-overload, I don't think it helps to call attention to things that aren't worth other people's time.
- theoh 8y agoOK, I get that you object to the blogger "surfacing" this book at all. More generally, though, a lot of people pay attention to value cues like the simple fact that something has been professionally published. With books, I'm sure you would agree that there are multiple filters that people apply. The general availability of a book attests to the fact that it passed some kind of quality control, however feeble. The general condition when it comes to reviewing is that the products are out there anyway, so both positive and negative reviews are appropriate. The tradition of literary book reviews (e.g. the NYRB, LRB) is to turn the review into an timely essay, maybe cover a few recent releases, express an opinion, pass on the most interesting facts etc. The point is to make the review a self-contained literary work, capable of being read for its own sake, for information or for pleasure. I think that's what this blog post does, it takes something curious and makes an entertaining story out of it. You might think that this isn't "worth other people's time", in the sense that it doesn't advance an alternative, more relevant approach to covering the book's subject matter. But the review is potentially worth their time if it sheds light on anything (academic eccentricity, the importance of typesetting in scholarly work, anxieties about systemic racism in 21st C academic writing, etc.) There's another discussion to be had about fields where negative reviews are rare, like visual art. In that case, publishing any review at all does serve to draw attention to/advertise/"surface" the artwork in question. Critics aren't really able to distance themselves from the world of artists and curators, so they can't really say anything too negative. But that's a bit of a digression. The book might not be worth people's time as a CS text. That doesn't mean the blog post isn't worth their time as a reflection on other phenomena. Underwood Dudley wrote multiple books about mathematical cranks. Cranks get a bad press for wasting mathematicians' time and being impossible to convince of the errors in their work. But isn't the phenomenon of crank culture interesting, and couldn't it potentially teach us something about human nature?
- sincerely 8y agoThe slavery quotes at the beginning of each chapter certainly make this strange enough that I’m glad to have heard of it
- scarcely 8y agoHN is, at least in name, about stuff that gratifies "intellectual curiosity", not pruient or morbid curiosity.
- EamonnMR 8y agoSeems to be overwhelmed by traffic.
- amelius 8y agoTitle seems to imply there's only one theory of computation.
- erwan 8y agoThe Theory of Computation vs. The Theory of Computation
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- evanweaver 8y ago“Mirror Worlds” by David Gelernter if you want a weird CS book that contains genuine insight.
- mysterypie 8y agoYou can browse a few pages of the Simon book at this link supplied in the OP's comments section[1]. It actually looks like a highly readable intro to automata theory, and much more enjoyable than Hopcroft and Ullman's book Introduction to Automata, Languages, and Computation that the OP himself recommends in his comments. I found Hopcroft and Ullman to be a dull, formal proof-based approach with few of the practical examples that one needs to get an intuitive feel for a subject. The Simon book might be a bit of the opposite--too many practical examples and not enough theory--but, hey, I would have preferred that over Hopcroft and Ullman (or in addition to it). Many of OP's objections come off as petty, like "the author uses the capital letter "X" to represent ×, the cross product symbol." Come on, really? I think the OP's real reason for hating the book was the strange quotes Simon used; it was a bad decision for Simon to use those quotes even if he had absolutely no political agenda, because someone somewhere is going to take it the wrong way, and academia being the leading edge of the politically correct movement is especially dangerous. [1] http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbooks.google.com%2Fbooks%3Fid%3DpGTpuWTIoNsC%26pg%3DPA5%26lpg%3DPA5%26dq%3D%2522White%2Band%2BNegro%2Bproduces%2Bmulatto%2522%26source%3Dbl%26ots%3DqrkM372LYY%26sig%3DoBiERDev99DMwQpO15wC5hyugIM%26hl%3Den%26ei%3Db9BTStSXAZ-ltge06MymCA%26sa%3DX%26oi%3Dbook_result%26ct%3Dresult%26resnum%3D1&ei=b9BTStSXAZ-ltge06MymCA&rct=j&q=%22White+and+Negro+produces+mulatto%22&usg=AFQjCNH6b3GY22Kti90ru8mFAr-6eAAgcA http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=ht...
- jey 8y agoLooks like it was typeset in MS Word. Seems this project is a good start but really could use some editing.
- thebooktocome 8y ago> Come on, really? Yes, really. It's exceedingly annoying to read a mathematics text that does not conform to the usual typographic conventions. These kinds of considerations are particularly important if one wants to teach out of a textbook, because it gets annoying and confusing for students to constantly have to transcribe notation into the modern convention.
- erwan 8y ago
- erwan 8y agoWhat a coincidence. Last week, I had a midterm that covered formal languages and automata theory. I went to the Davis Centre Library at the University of Waterloo looking for books on Automata Theory. I stumbled upon that very book. And though I dismissed it because the formatting was horrible, I did notice its odd epigraphs. I found the cover a bit mysterious and amusingly out of place, and went with something else. Now, I read here on Hacker News, a high-profile website, about this most obscure review of this most obscure book written almost ten years ago - what's more? The person who wrote the review is also the one that requested that the library orders the book in the first place. He is one of my professors. Quite frankly the personification of what you would hope a scholar and teacher to be. I know I have no reasons to feel agitated but why do I feel like this is the prologue of a thriller?
- DoctorOetker 8y agoIt's time travel and superposition of interfering multiverses all the way down :P
- benbreen 8y agoTo make it more Borgesian for you, I have been baffled by the fact that the author of Automata Theory, Matthew Simon, has left almost no traces on Google besides this book and one other book called Emergent Computation, which is similarly eccentric. (Browsing it now, I came across a weird quote about Pope Clement and self-flagellation, then it's right back to automata theory again). Could it be that he wrote under a pen name?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- charmides 8y agoTerrible textbooks are written all the time by cranks and eccentrics, and I did not see how this book stood out from the rest.
- tern 8y agoAnother fascinating and strange book on logic — The Laws of Form — is worth tracking down. Even more strange, the only other book published by the author, under a pseudonym.
- erwan 8y agoThanks for sharing, this is a fascinating topic I just started investigating. Check out "Calculating Space" by Konrad Zuse (the inventor of the first programmable computer). Coincidentally, he published in 1969 - "The Laws of Form" was published the same year. Link: ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/zuserechnenderraum.pdf
- westoncb 8y agoI feel like there's something I'm missing: it doesn't make any sense that this book would be published... Reading some of the preview material at Amazon, the chapters often start with brutal depictions of violence against African American slaves. I get no sense of the purpose of these passages; they don't appear to be taking a stance in anyway, just quoting from old sources. The only charitable interpretation I can think of is something along the lines I remember Asimov writing about: humankind always uses slaves; they stop when it's economically viable to use machines instead. And in a way automata theory is a very general theory of abstract machines which we use to substitute human labor in many ways... So maybe he's giving a visceral reminder of the importance of the subject matter at hand (automata theory)? Additionally, the table of contents does look interesting. I've read Sipser, and I'd now be interested in this different angle on the subject (Sipser felt more isolated from other parts of mathematics; this starting out by connecting to semigroups for instance seems interesting)—but that said, it's just too bizarre: Its 'Chapter 0,' titled "Mathematical Preliminaries," opens with a full-page passage of the sort I described above. To give the flavor, here are a few lines included in it: "... Who are generally presented, being secur'd by Bastias or negro drivers, And instantly tied Up to the Beams of the Plaza, or a Tree, Without so much as being heard, When the flogging begins, men, women, or children, without exception, on theyr long naked bodies, by long hempin whips that cut round at every lash, and crack like a pistol, during which they alternately repeat Dankee Massera, /Thank You Master/, but while he stalks up and down with his overseer..." —and on and on. wtf. The next page is the standard sort of presentation of mathematical notation you'd expect.
- zshrdlu 8y agoDoes it really bother you that much? Aren't you amused, even slightly?
- mcphage 8y ago> Aren't you amused, even slightly? What about that do you find amusing?
- westoncb 8y agoI don't mean to give the wrong impression: I'm actually highly amused by it. But at the same time, as a heuristic for judging whether something I might read is worthwhile or not... well, the author gives me the impression of being slightly off his rocker, which makes me question whether I can trust the material.
- jayalpha 8y agoMy knowledge of computation theory is not good enough to judge the book. Why he used the strange quotes. Who knows. But he wrote more books. Like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Emergent-Computation-Emphasizing-Bioinformatics-Engineering-ebook/dp/B000WDQL9Y https://www.amazon.com/Emergent-Computation-Emphasizing-Bioi... You can browse a little bin on google books: https://books.google.com.sg/books?id=d2i8q2PayrQC&pg=PR7&lpg=PR7&dq=Automata+Theory++Matthew+Simon&source=bl&ots=bgQ0hSSBnF&sig=7SNMUVaNwbbKQBIUPE_cZXwmVeA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwifwJzntKreAhUGUlAKHSacASUQ6AEwCHoECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=Automata%20Theory%20%20Matthew%20Simon&f=false https://books.google.com.sg/books?id=d2i8q2PayrQC&pg=PR7&lpg... Must say, the content looks rather interesting to me. I am actually consider buying it.