Name: Reinventing discovery
ISBN: 9780691160191

Reinventing discovery

"In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery. There are many books about how the internet is changing business or the workplace or government. But this is the first book about something much more fundamental: how the internet is transforming the nature of our collective intelligence and how we understand the world. Reinventing Discovery tells the exciting story of an unprecedented new era of networked science. We learn, for example, how mathematicians in the Polymath Project are spontaneously coming together to collaborate online, tackling and rapidly demolishing previously unsolved problems. We learn how 250,000 amateur astronomers are working together in a project called Galaxy Zoo to understand the large-scale structure of the Universe, and how they are making astonishing discoveries, including an entirely new kind of galaxy. These efforts are just a small part of the larger story told in this book--the story of how scientists are using the internet to dramatically expand our problem-solving ability and increase our combined brainpower.

What Hacker News says

m-watsonNov 2022

I often say to people that the most important thing physics gave me was being comfortable not knowing something. My math and physics education have 100% changed the way I think and address problems in life, despite not going into a physics career.

Since it is a book thread:

The Information: James Gleick - really made me take a step back to think about what information is and how we talk about it

Reinventing Discovery: Michael Nielsen - It was some years back now but I had trouble reading it because I kept having to write things down or read about a new idea the book just put into my head. It really was thought provoking at the time.

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abecedariusApr 2015

"Hypertext Publishing and the Evolution of Knowledge" had ideas in this general area back before the web existed. An excerpt: "One result of all this activity is what amounts to a review article, developed incrementally, thoroughly critiqued, and regularly updated. It takes the form of a hierarchy of topics bottoming out in a hierarchy of result-summaries; disagreements appear as argumentation structures [17]. When new results are accepted, their authors propose modifications to the summary-document; they become visible (to a typical reader) to the extent that they become accepted."

http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/Hypertext/HPEK3.html#anchor3165... (to link to a relatively concrete scenario; the paper as a whole is interesting but some of it had to be just to address the very desirability of something like the web.)

Much more recent and also good: Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen.

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abecedariusJul 2013

I would recommend the book mentioned at the bottom as well -- http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Discovery-The-Networked-Sc...

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elahiehApr 2018

At the time I was involved in the Computer Chess Team and wrote the post-game summary for slashdot.org. I still like to analyse the game with the latest versions of Stockfish when they come out, with whatever EC2 hardware I can get hold of.

The problem with the Wikipedia article is the subjectivity of how the "?" and "!" annotations on the moves are handed out - sometimes they are quite wrong.

The clearest example in the article is the fact that 37... e6 loses and thus it deserves a double question mark, because 37... e5 draws. Anybody who downloads Stockfish and the six piece table bases can see that very quickly in 2018, but I suppose Wikipedia requires an "authoritative" published source on that before it can go into the article. Similarly on the next move, 38. Rd1 wins, whereas Kasparov's 38. h6 only draws. So that also deserves at least a question mark. (perhaps Chessbase should do an article on it)

Other dubious annotations are 18... f5 when 18... Bd4 is a clear draw (also in the Kasparov and King book) and perhaps 26... f4 when 26... Bc5 was better (in "Reinventing Discovery" the author writes about this move choice quite a bit).

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michael_nielsenDec 2013

I'm currently working on my third book, a book about neural networks and deep learning. Here's the first chapter:

http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html

It'll be free online once complete, but I raised money with an Indiegogo campaign (about 10k). I'm self-publishing, in part because I wanted full control over the book. This gives me the ability to experiment with in-text videos, and with other tricks. For instance, when a reader clicks on an equation reference in the text, the relevant equation appears in the margin, as a reminder. Clicking on the marginal equation will take you to the context in which the equation originally appeared. This cuts down on tedious back-and-forth.

My two earlier books were both published in the traditional way:

+ A book for general audiences about networked science, "Reinventing Discovery: the New Era of Networked Science": http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691160198 Published by Princeton University Press.

+ A textbook about quantum computing, jointly with Ike Chuang: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation-Information-Annive... Published by Cambridge University Press. No e-book at all when first published (2000)!

Both were written with LaTeX, and included many illustrations. "Reinventing Discovery" was actually rekeyed entirely by the publisher, but the textbook was produced from our LaTeX copy.

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petefordeAug 2010

Michael Nielsen is working on a new book called "Reinventing Discovery" which I very much hope is a step in this direction.

http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/michael-a-nielsen/

At any rate, the folks on PatientsLikeMe.com are sharing, and they have results to show for it:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_heywood_the_big_idea_my_broth...

Really inspiring stuff, because I assure you that the folks participating in these programs do not consider themselves hackers OR radicals.

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