The following references haven't been incorporated into any pages yet. These books are difficult to classify, as most fall on the interesting boundaries between Evolution, Design, Computation, and Intelligence.
I attended this tutorial at IJCAI-2001; Dorigo and others have published numerous books and articles.
Dyson, George B., 1997.
Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence.
Dyson focuses on ideas from Von Neumann, etc. from the early years of
computing and their relevance for today. He gave a great
presentation at Google and did a very interesting
two-part write-up on www.edge.org afterwards:
part I,
part II.
Szuba, Tadeusz M., 2001.
Computational Collective Intelligence.
The most mind-bending book on collective intelligence I have found.
Wikipedia attempts to summarize it
here.
Szuba describes a Random Prolog Processor and asserts his parallel (social)
probabilistic algorithms can be polynomial for NP problems (p. 56).
Battelle, John, 2005.
The Search: How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of
Business and Transformed our Culture.
Manning, Christopher D. and Hinrich Schutze, 1999.
Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing.
Mitchell, Tom M., 1997.
Machine Learning.
This book is good but dated; a new edition would probably focus more
strongly on new statistical techniques.
Language took over areas evolved to control timing in throwing.
As a board gamer I love the centrality of the hexagon in his theory.
Hawkins, Jeff, with Sandra Blakeslee, 2004.
On Intelligence.
Hawkins focuses on the use of feedback in pattern recognition and
memory. He has founded a new startup
Numenta to build hardware
based on these ideas. The Redwood Neuroscience Institute researchers
also developed these ideas; a video is available
here.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson, 1999.
Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge
to Western Thought.
Lakoff and Johnson present three basic findings from cognitive science
research (p. 3):
Minsky, Marvin, 1985.
The Society of Mind.
Minsky proposes the mind operates as a huge collection (society)
of simple agents
each specializing on different parts of the problems of intelligence.
The book itself is a collection of 270 interlinked one-page essays about
these ideas. For years whenever someone posed a question in the
comp.ai.philosophy newsgroup Minsky would answer with a reference
to the appropriate numbered essay.
Minsky, Marvin, 2006.
The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind.
Minsky expands on the role of emotions in his Society of Mind theory.
Draft currently available on his home page
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/.
Pinker, Steven, 1997.
How the Mind Works.
Emergence and exploration of the adjacent possible:
"In short, the known universe has not had time since the big bang
to create all possible proteins of length 200 once." (p. 144)
Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, 2002.
Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species.
Margulis and Sagan radically argue that new species often
arise not through mutation
but instead through symbiotic merger of genomes: "the branches
of animal evolutionary trees do not just branch but fuse." (p. 172)
Fascinating examples include insects and sea slugs.
Dennett, Daniel C., 1995.
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life.
Language is a technology used to describe how to make other
technologies, like axes.
Calvin, William H., 2000.
Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the
Human Brain.
Language used for reciprocal altruism.
Deacon, Terrence W., 1997.
The Symbolic Species: The co-evolution of language and the brain.
Proposes language was invented to make marriage work.
Dennett, Daniel C., 1986. "Julian Jayne's Software Archeology",
in Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds, 1998.
Greenspan, Stanley I., and Stuart G. Shanker, 2004.
The First Idea: How Symbols, Language and Intelligence Evolved
from Our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans.
Importance of early nurturing in passing on cultural knowledge.
Jaynes, Julian, 1976.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Alan Kay in Wired: "Did you ever read that book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian James? He claims that we didn't even get aware of consciousness until recently. It's the best book I've ever read that couldn't possibly be true."
Dennett,
above, was also fascinated: "How could one take such a book seriously?
Because it asked some very good questions that had never been properly
asked before and boldly proposed answers to them." (p. 121)
Jaynes proposed that in early civilizations humans were not fully conscious
and were instead ruled by inner voices. The large differences between
the Iliad and Odyssey or the Old and New Testaments were not just
stylistic but actually reflect changes in how humans experienced the world.
Laments about the gods leaving were triggered by
the withdrawal of the bicameral voices.
Pinker, Steven, 1994.
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language.
Stewart, Ian and Jack Cohen, 1997.
Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind.
Flake, Gary William, 1998.
The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computational Explorations of
Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation.
Meinhardt, Hans, 2003.
The Algorithmic Beauty of Seashells.
Wade, David, 2003.
Li: Dynamic Form in Nature.
A small, short book of black and white pictures of fascinating
shapes in nature.
Wolfram, Stephen, 2002.
A New Kind of Science.
For a more radical view of the universe-as-cellular-automata-computation
see Edward Fredkin's
Digital Philosophy.
Alexander is an architect, and he specified a language of patterns usable
by anyone to design buildings and spaces people would be comfortable living in.
In Gamma et. al. software engineers appropriated the
pattern concept for computer programming.
Alexander, Christopher, 1979.
The Timeless Way of Building.
Alexander, Christopher, 2002.
The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature
of the Universe. Volume 1: The Phenomenon of Life. Volume 2: The
Process of Creating Life.
In the Nature of Order Alexander describes the principles underlying
his patterns. He believes some design forms measurably contain more life.
"I managed to identify fifteen structural features which appear again and
again in things which do have life. These are (p. 144):
Gamma, Erich, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, 1995.
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.
Czarnecki, Krzysztof, and Ulrich W. Eisenecker, 2000.
Generative Programming: Methods, Tools, and Applications.
Greenfield, Jack and Keith Short, 2004.
Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patterns,
Models, Frameworks, and Tools.
Lipson, Hod, Erik K. Antonsson, and John R. Koza, cochairs, 2003.
Computational Synthesis: From Basic Building Blocks to High Level
Functionality. Papers from the 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium.
I attended this symposium. The presented papers formed
an interesting mixture of domain-specific languages,
code generation, and evolutionary techniques.
We haven't gotten any smarter.
Mandelbrot, Benoit and Richard L. Hudson, 2004.
The (Mis)behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and
Reward.
The inventor of fractals criticizes the use of normal (Gaussian)
probability distributions to model price changes in financial markets.
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 2001.
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets
and Life.
Demonstrates the power of Monte Carlo (random number computer
simulation) techniques in financial modeling.
Kurzweil, Ray, 2005.
The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.
Presents key technologies leading up to the singularity, and why we
shouldn't be worried. His key technologies are (from Table of Contents):
Stross, Charles, 2005.
Accelerando.
A great science fiction presentation of the events in the lives of the
last generation of humans
and the first generations of post-humans.
Vinge, Vernor, 1993.
The Singularity.
Computer Algorithms
With the huge rise in grid computing power and availability of large
datasets the emphasis in Artificial Intelligence has
drastically shifted to Statistical Machine Learning.
How the Mind Works
Calvin, William H., 1996.
The Cerebral Code: Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind.
and examine their impact on Western Philosophy. Artificial Intelligence
researchers such as Rodney Brooks also recognize their huge impact on A.I.
They realize that we utilize our embodied experience of a three-dimensional
world to reason about abstract concepts. We use metaphor to bridge
(a metaphor :-) between
the physical and abstract worlds. A "brain in a vat" A.I. has no experience
of real-world relationships and cannot understand and utilize metaphors
correctly. This realization helped spur new interest in
humanoid robots such as
Cog.
Evolutionary Theory
Kauffman, Stuart, 2000.
Investigations.
Origins of Consciousness, Language, Culture, and Technology
Burke, James and Robert Ornstein, 1997.
The Axemaker's Gift: Technology's Capture and Control of our
Minds and Culture.
Algorithmic Forms in Nature
Ball, Philip, 1999.
The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature.
Design
Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, 1977.
A Pattern Language.
For Alexander an artificial structure contains life when it is created
using the same types of recursively composed, algorithmic processes
used by nature. Thus his books are closely tied to the others
about algorithmic forms in nature.
Code Generation
Code generation is a programming technique whereby a high-level declarative
specification (genotype) of a system is turned into working code
(phenotype). The high-level
specification can be done in a domain specific mini-language optimized
for the application. The high-level specification, which forms the "DNA"
of the application, can also be manipulated using evolutionary
algorithms. Note the repetition of the language and pattern concepts
from Alexander.
Economics
Mackay, Charles, 1841.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
The Singularity
Vinge introduced the singularity concept in his
1993 essay. He asserted that within 30 years we would create superhuman
intelligence. As both a scientist and science fiction
writer he found it quite difficult to project what would happen after this
event.
He maintains a detailed web site
KurzweilAI.net.
Reconciliation between Science and the Humanities
Wilson, Edward O., 1998.
Conscilience: The Unity of Knowledge.