Product Description: I. ALEKSANDER Kobler Unit for Information Technology Management, Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, England It is now over half a decade since Joseph Engelberger wrote: 'Given a six-articulation arm of any configuration, software can be powerful enough to think only in tool coordinates...read more

Aspects of consciousness explored by a leading researcher of Artificial Intelligence for a general audience.

Igor Aleksander heads a major British team that has applied engineering principles to the understanding of the human brain and has built several pioneering machines, culminating in MAGNUS, which he calls a machine with imagination. When he asks it (in words) to produce an image of a banana that is blue with red spots, the image appears on the screen in seconds. The idea of such an apparently imaginative, even conscious machine seems heretical and its advocates are often accused of sensationalism, arrogance, or philosophical ignorance. Part of the problem, according to Aleksander, is that consciousness remains ill-defined.Interweaving anecdotes from his own life and research with imagined dialogues between historical figures―including Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, Francis Crick, and Steven Pinker―Aleksander leads readers toward an understanding of consciousness. He shows not only how the latest work with artificial neural systems suggests that an artificial form of consciousness is possible but also that its design would clarify many of the puzzles surrounding the murky concept of consciousness itself. The book also looks at the presentation of "self" in robots, the learning of language, and the nature of emotion, will, instinct, and feelings. (view table of contents)

Product Description: BIOTICA: ART, EMERGENCE AND ARTIFICIAL LIFE by RICHARD BROWN with IGOR ALEKSANDER, JONATHAN MACKENZIE and JOE FAITH with a preface by MIKE KING BIOTICA describes a two-year research project that explored the relationships between artistic practice, programming and theories of artificial life and emergence...read more

Product Description: "Neurons and Symbols", the successor to the authors' work "An Introduction to Neural Computing", presents in a unified explanatory style the emerging points of a fierce contemporary debate on the effect that neural models are likely to have on more classic symbolic models of cognition...read more

Product Description: McClelland and Rumelhart's Parallel Distributed Processing was the first book to present a definitive account of the newly revived connectionist/neural net paradigm for artificial intelligence and cognitive science. While Neural Computing Architectures addresses the same issues, there is little overlap in the research it reports...read more

Product Description: McClelland and Rumelhart's Parallel Distributed Processing was the first book to present a definitive account of the newly revived connectionist/neural net paradigm for artificial intelligence and cognitive science. While Neural Computing Architectures addresses the same issues, there is little overlap in the research it reports...read more

Describes the efforts of researchers to make a computer which thinks like a human being

Product Description: This is a general introduction to the fundamental concepts of intelligent systems. The history, definition and nature of these systems are outlined, and the author introduces the mathematical and other languages used to describe and model intelligence...read more

Traces the history of the struggles of scientists to create a machine which could actually reproduce the thought process of human beings

Product Description: Book by Aleksander, Igor