Before legally changing his name, Simon Hawke wrote as Nicholas Yermakov. This new edition of FALL INTO DARKNESS is back in print for the first time in over 30 years. Novi’kavkaz was an Earth colony that had lost its way. One day, the ships ceased to arrive from Earth. No one knew why or what had happened. The few ships sent out did not return. And finally, there were no more ships to send. The years passed, and the society on Novi’kavkaz began to stagnate and decay. All technological progress ended after several hundred years, and then came the regression. Two thousand years after the first humans came to Novi’kavkaz, even the planet’s history was lost. The remnants of the marvelous technology were like grim reminders of another, spectral civilization. Some of the artifacts still worked, but for the most part, they were barely operative objects of mystery and speculation. The culture of Novi’kavkaz had begun to decay long before the machines wore out or the ships stopped coming. After two thousand years, the social structure had been distilled into an upper and a lower class. Those who ruled, and those who were ruled. But always, there were exceptions. The Z’kazan were a warrior class who served the pampered, decadent nobility, kept the working class in line, and lived by a rigid code of honor that defined them and their families. And one day, a glaring violation of that code set into motion events that completely changed the course of three young lives: A’drei, the tortured and confused young prince who did not want the throne he had no choice but to ascend; R’uslahn, the Z’kazan’s son with a burning thirst for vengeance that no amount of violence could quench; and M’ikhail, his younger brother, who wanted nothing more than the peace that kept eluding him. And it all began with the casting of a gauntlet….

Product Description: Before legally changing his name, Simon Hawke wrote as Nicholas Yermakov. This new edition of FALL INTO DARKNESS is back in print for the first time in over 30 years. Novi’kavkaz was an Earth colony that had lost its way. One day, the ships ceased to arrive from Earth...read more

Product Description: "Psi" is the term used by researchers for a variety of demonstrable but elusive psychic phenomena. This collection of essays provides a detailed survey of the evidence for psi at the level of scientific examination. Key features of apparent psi phenomena are reviewed, including precognition and remote perception (knowledge of future or distant events that cannot be inferred from present information), presentiment (physiological responses to stimuli that have not yet occurred), the effects of human emotions on globally dispersed machines, the possible impact of local sidereal time on psi performance, and the familiar feeling of knowing who is calling on the phone...read more

Product Description: This book is a collection of writings by active researchers in the field of Artificial General Intelligence, on topics of central importance in the field. Each chapter focuses on one theoretical problem, proposes a novel solution, and is written in sufficiently non-technical language to be understandable by advanced undergraduates or scientists in allied fields...read more

The general problem addressed in this book is a large and important one: how to usefully deal with huge storehouses of complex information about real-world situations. Every one of the major modes of interacting with such storehouses – querying, data mining, data analysis – is addressed by current technologies only in very limited and unsatisfactory ways. The impact of a solution to this problem would be huge and pervasive, as the domains of human pursuit to which such storehouses are acutely relevant is numerous and rapidly growing. Finally, we give a more detailed treatment of one potential solution with this class, based on our prior work with the Probabilistic Logic Networks (PLN) formalism. We show how PLN can be used to carry out realworld reasoning, by means of a number of practical examples of reasoning regarding human activities inreal-world situations.

Product Description: Creating Internet Intelligence is an interdisciplinary treatise exploring the hypothesis that global computer and communication networks will one day evolve into an autonomous intelligent system, and making specific recommendations as to what engineers and scientists can do today to encourage and shape this evolution...read more

Product Description: Cybernetic pioneer Warren McCullough asked: "What is a man, that he may know a number; and what is a number, that a man may know it?" Thinking along much the same lines, my question here is: "What is a creative mind, that it might emerge from a complex system; and what is a complex system, that it might give rise to a creative mind?" Complexity science is a fashionable topic these days...read more

Product Description: Abstract In this chapter we provide an overview of probabilistic logic networks (PLN), including our motivations for developing PLN and the guiding principles underlying PLN. We discuss foundational choices we made, introduce PLN knowledge representation, and briefly introduce inference rules and truth-values...read more

Product Description: The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) was initially directly aimed at the construction of 'thinking machines' - that is, computer systems with human-like general intelligence. But this task proved more difficult than expected...read more

“Only a small community has concentratedon general intelligence. No one has tried to make a thinking machine . . . The bottom line is that we really haven’t progressed too far toward a truly intelligent machine. We have collections of dumb specialists in small domains; the true majesty of general intelligence still awaits our attack. . . . We have got to get back to the deepest questions of AI and general intelligence. . . ” –MarvinMinsky as interviewed in Hal’s Legacy, edited by David Stork, 2000. Our goal in creating this edited volume has been to ?ll an apparent gap in the scienti?c literature, by providing a coherent presentation of a body of contemporary research that, in spite of its integral importance, has hitherto kept a very low pro?le within the scienti?c and intellectual community. This body of work has not been given a name before; in this book we christen it “Arti?cial General Intelligence” (AGI). What distinguishes AGI work from run-of-the-mill “arti?cial intelligence” research is that it is explicitly focused on engineering general intelligence in the short term. We have been active researchers in the AGI ?eld for many years, and it has been a pleasure to gather together papers from our colleagues working on related ideas from their own perspectives. In the Introduction we give a conceptual overview of the AGI ?eld, and also summarize and interrelate the key ideas of the papers in the subsequent chapters.

Product Description: The Hidden Pattern presents a novel philosophy of mind, intended to form a coherent conceptual framework within which it is possible to understand the diverse aspects of mind and intelligence in a unified way. The central concept of the philosophy presented is the concept of "pattern": minds and the world they live in and co-create are viewed as patterned systems of patterns, evolving over time, and various aspects of subjective experience and individual and social intelligence are analyzed in detail in this light...read more

Product Description: This work describes the near future technologies and scientific changes that will effect human life in the next 25 years. Artificial intelligence is a major theme of this book as is computing and biotech. The author argues we are in a transitional period in which the major changes of the next quarter century are only barely developed: genome research, human enhancement, computer to computer research, bioinformatics to mention only a few...read more

Product Description: This volume presents a collection of essays that all share a common concern with time, process and consciousness. The chapters represent a variety of different perspectives and the authors span the disciplines of psychology, mathematics, physics and psychiatry.

Chronicles Pauling's life from the Oregon frontier to his political campaigns against nuclear testing and the medical establishment

Product Description: This book summarizes a network of interrelated ideas which I have developed, off and on, over the past eight or ten years. The underlying theme is the psychological interplay of order and chaos. Or, to put it another way, the interplay of deduction and induction...read more

Product Description: First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: 0. 0 Psychology versus Complex Systems Science Over the last century, psychology has become much less of an art and much more of a science. Philosophical speculation is out; data collection is in. In many ways this has been a very positive trend...read more