Free Feynman Lectures On Computation Ebooks Online
"When, in 1984–86, Richard P. Feynman gave his famous course on computation at the California Institute of Technology, he asked Tony Hey to adapt his lecture notes into a book. Although led by Feynman,"
Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Westview Press; Revised ed. edition (July 7, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0738202967
ISBN-13: 978-0738202969
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #263,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #42 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > AI & Machine Learning > Machine Theory #80 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Information Theory #85 in Books > Science & Math > Mathematics > Pure Mathematics > Discrete Mathematics
Yes, I think you can teach the theory of computation from this book. And you can learn it from this book. Some of the material isn't all that recent, but much of it doesn't need to be.35 years ago, if one were teaching a course on the theory of computation, I'd have recommended Minsky's book (it came out in 1967). That was a great text. Nowadays, there are numerous choices. But one could still use books that originally came out well before Feynman's notes, such as Lewis & Papadimitriou or Hopcroft, Motwani, and Ullman.The question boils down to the quality of what is in the book, as well as what material it has that other books do not, and what material it is missing that most other texts have.This book is quite readable and preserves much of Feynman's teaching style. So let's look at what it is missing. First, it doesn't talk much about real neurons. Of course, even Minsky doesn't dwell much on that, and other computation books avoid that topic too. But now, there's a more serious omission. Feynman spends something like two pages on grammars! If you were using Lewis and Papadimitriou (first edition) there would be a chapter of over 70 pages on context-free languages alone. As a teacher or a student, would you really want to miss all that?No, as a student, you would have to read up on all that material elsewhere. And as a teacher, you would have to use another book or write your own notes. That material is too much a part of most required curricula.But that doesn't take away from the value of the book when it comes to the rest of the material.
Of course, 'brilliant' is what you'd expect from Feynman. These lectures, originally presented in 1983-6, capture a number of the most fundamental, esoteric concepts in computing. Since Feynman is doing the explaining, however, the ideas come across clear and strong.Chapter 3, on the basic theory of computation, introduces not only the Turing machine, but also the basic idea of what things can and can not possibly be computed and why. He also explains the "universal" machine, and the meaning of universality that mathematically steps up from any one machine to all machines. The next chapters discuss coding theory. That has body of knowledge has since become pervasive in our every-day lives, even if it's never visible. After that two chapters present the physical limits to computation, and how computation can approach those limits using quantum mechanics.This includes the superfically odd idea of reversible computation. I say odd because, for example, knowing that two numbers add up to six doesn't tell you whether the two were five and one, zero and six, or some other combination. You normally can't run addition backwards from the sum to the summands, so standard addition is said to be irreversible. Reversibility gives amazing properties to a system, however, and things like the Toffoli gates show how it can be implemented.The only disappointments in this book come from the very beginning and very end. The beginning describes what a computer is, as if the reader had never heard of computers before. I guess that basic level is still needed, but is no longer needed at the college level. The very end describes silicon technology, as it was known in the early 1980s.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. II: The New Millennium Edition: Mainly Electromagnetism and Matter (Feynman Lectures on Physics (Paperback)) (Volume 2) Feynman Lectures On Computation The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I: The New Millennium Edition: Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat (Volume 1) The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Volume 1, Quantum Mechanics The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Volume 2, Advanced Quantum Mechanics Generalized Quantifiers and Computation: 9th European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information, ESSLLI'97 Workshop, Aix-en-Provence, France, ... Lectures (Lecture Notes in Computer Science) Lectures on Calvinism, The Stone Lectures of 1898 A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Many-Body Problem: Second Edition (Dover Books on Physics) The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! axiom(TM): The Scientific Computation System Boosting: Foundations and Algorithms (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series) Evolution as Computation The Design of Innovation: Lessons from and for Competent Genetic Algorithms (Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Computation) Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11 Modern Fortran Explained (Numerical Mathematics and Scientific Computation) 4th (Fourth) Edition Common LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation (Dover Books on Engineering) Thinking as Computation: A First Course (MIT Press) Thinking as Computation: A First Course (Hardback) - Common Structured Parallel Programming: Patterns for Efficient Computation
