Making meaning: Pattern on the Stone

Pattern on the Stone does a great job in explaining the basic concepts of computers. It may be boring at times but this book explains complex ideas in a very simplistic manner thats easy to follow. One of the most helpful parts of the book to me was the descriptions of simple computers using sticks and string and one using water pipes. The accompanying pictures provided a good visual representation of these simple computer and greatly impacted the effectiveness of the chapters. Another example of helpful diagrams is where Hillis shows the logic behind or and and statements showing what these statements would look like if built mechanically (Pattern on the Stone chapter 1). The diagrams of what things would look like if built mechanically really helped me to better understand the concepts being presented.

One section that was very interesting to me was the section on simulated evolution. Basically this section describes the process of testing a batch of random programs to find which accomplishes the desired task the best. Then using survival of the fittest, take the best ones and combine the successful aspects of each to create a even better program. Then repeat this process until it has been optimized. After reading this section I looked up evolutionary computation and found that the selection process is not just the strong programs moving on. There are other methods that allow the weaker programs to survive and become mutated into better programs. I also learned that the search process is guided using parallel processing which was a section of the book that I found boring, but my interest in evolutionary computation got me to reread that section and helped me to better understand it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_computation).

Another thing that this book taught me is what a bit actually was. Previously I had only thought of bits as the 32 or 64 bits of a computer operating system. But after reading this book I learned that bits are actually "the unit of measure for information" (Pattern on the Stone chapter 6) These bits are very limited so bits are compressed to allow for more storage. That chapter also went on to talk about image segmentation and how pictures of a face for example will contain less bits than that of a pile of pebbles because the adjacent pixels are similar. It was also explained that this process can even be done for sounds and video.

The only part of this book that I disliked was the section on neural networks, This section didn't make any sense to me on my first read through it. I was never really big into science, and neural networks are based on the human brain, neurons, and their connections. So the majority of this chapter flew over my head. But I did understand the part on training a program to learn to recognize letters. It does this by receiving several inputs of the letter and then comparing the shape of the thing given to them to the curves and lines of the letters that were inputted.I understood this mainly because it somewhat reminded me of image segmentation and the process of comparing surrounding pixels.

All in all I think that this book is a great source of information for someone with a interest in computers. It does a great job at explaining so even if you have no background in computers you will still be able to understand it. I also really enjoyed Hillis including things that he had created in his life. Like the Tinker Toy computer, which played tick tack toe and never lost.

Works cited

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

"Evolutionary Computation." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 03 Oct. 2016. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_computation>.