The nature of computation

What Hacker News says

1. hackrnusrJan 2023
   Surprised the author didn't mention the book Nature of Computation by Mertens and Moore.

   It's a classic ... and available now at the everyday low price of $0 on LibGen.

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2. hexomancerAug 2022
   Really excited for this book. I would also recommend "The Nature of Computation" by Cristopher Moore and Stephan Mertens if you are interested in these topics.

   It is really an underrated book and hands-down is the most enjoyable technical book that I have ever read.

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3. rindalirMay 2022
   Some "pop"-sci books that have inspired me:

   1."Uncle Petros & Goldback's Conjecture" & "Logicomix" (both by Apostolos Doxiadis),

   2."Chaos" by James Gleick,

   3. "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers" by Paul Hoffman

   4. "A Mathematician's Apology" by G.H. Hardy

   5. "The Indian Clerk" (fiction) by David Leavitt (about GH Hardy & Ramanujan)

   6. "Genius at Play" by Siobhan Roberts (about John Conway). Normally I stay away from pop-math books with the words "The mind of..." or "Genius" in the title but this is a delightful book.

   Some "actual" math books: 1. Nonlinear Dynamics & Chaos (Strogatz)

   2. the Way of Analysis (Strichartz) -- note, this one is controversial as to its quality as a math book but I really like the presentation style

   3. The Nature of Computation (Moore & Mertens)

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4. chermiApr 2022
   Edit -- I'm an idiot and misread OP. I read "inspired by nature", rather than specifically "biology". Keeping everything below here just for goofs. I think the only thing that applies is the Computational Beauty of Nature book recc.

   --------

   There's a bunch of methods that come out of casting an optimization or search problem into a thermal system with an artificial energy and corresponding conjugate (artificial) temperature.

   Most people are familiar with (Gibbs-ish) Monte Carlo methods, for example. Then there's simulated annealing, tempering, parallel tempering, etc. Simulated annealing is universal optimizer with remarkable richness coming from the "energy landscape" perspective. Recent work by Riccardo zecchina has studied neural nets from this perspective, and the whole (largely) Italian gang of glassy landscape people have done really cool stuff with it including fundamental CS stuff like K-SAT.

   Lots of optimization algos use tricks that exploit analogies to thermal systems, given a sufficiently clever "Hamiltonion".

   I'm not up to date with the latest and greatest in NN training stuff, but I know a few of the preferred optimization algorithms used some form of gradient descent often with some artificial "momentum". Can't remember what it was called, maybe Adam or something? I know Michael Jordan at Berkeley does a lot cool stuff with along these lines.

   Very rambly message I see now, so I'll stop and just give some references/recs and maybe polish up later.

   A few recommendations--

   Nature of computation - Cris Moore I think

   Information and physics(?) - Mezard and montanari

   Computational beauty of nature -Flack(?)

   Newish book from SFI from a conference I was at a few years ago may interest you, The Energetics of Computing in Life and Machines https://www.amazon.com/dp/1947864076/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_i_JQXY...

   And most emphatically, Information, inference, and learning - Mackay

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5. chermiDec 2021
   You didn't ask me, but piggybacking anyway. Some of these I've been going back to for years starting back in my PhD, working through some ideas as I have time. Some I have recently been learning new things from.

   Approximately in that order below:

   Too many stat mech books, but honestly favorite is this old one. If you want a real challenge try to read to the OG Gibbs. Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics

   Lectures On Phase Transitions And The Renormalization Group

   Probability Theory: The Logic of Science

   Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms

   Information, Physics, and Computation

   Elements of Information Theory

   Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

   The Nature of Computation

   Principles of Cyber-Physical Systems

   Introduction to Embedded Systems, Second Edition: A Cyber-Physical Systems Approach

   Data-Driven Science and Engineering: Machine Learning, Dynamical Systems, and Control

   An Invitation to Applied Category Theory: Seven Sketches in Compositionality

   BTW, feel free to ask for recommendations in physics, especially stat mech, simulation/computation, condensed matter theory

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6. bssrdfMay 2020
   This book <<The Nature of Computation>>[0] has the best explanation I have ever seen.

   [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Computation-Cristopher-Moore-d...

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