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- "Design for a brain" by W. Ross Ashby (1953) is also worth a look, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40846986
> In 1949 Time described it as "the closest thing to a synthetic brain so far designed by man".
- Zilog Z-80 User's Manual:
http://www.zilog.com/appnotes_download.php?FromPage=DirectLi...
Design For A Brain - W. Ross Ashby
https://archive.org/download/designforbrain00ashb/designforb...
Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms - David MacKay
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.pdf
Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency - Nikola Tesla
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13476.epub.images
Capitalism - A Treatise on Economics
http://www.capitalism.net/Capitalism/CAPITALISM_Internet.pdf
AMD64 Programmer's Manual (Volume 1)
http://support.amd.com/TechDocs/24592.pdf
AMD64 Programmer's Manual (Volume 2)
http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/24593_APM_v...
AMD64 Programmer's Manual (Volume 3)
https://support.amd.com/TechDocs/24594.pdf
If you like sci-fi, check out the Baen Free Library:
http://www.baen.com/categories/free-library.html
and of course there's bound to be something at Project Gutenberg that you'd find interesting. You might find it interesting to go browse around there a bit.
Also note that you can export Wikipedia articles as PDF and you can even compose "books" made up of multiple Wikipedia articles. So if there's some topic you've been meaning to read up on, maybe go make yourself a WP book on that subject and take that along on your trip.
- The Law - Frédéric Bastiat. http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html
Capitalism - A Treatise on Economics - George Reisman. http://www.capitalism.net/Capitalism/CAPITALISM_Internet.pdf
The Works of Lysander Spooner. http://lysanderspooner.org/node/2
The Machinery of Freedom David Friedman. - http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
Democratizing Innovation - Eric Von Hippel. http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm
The Sources of Innovation - Eric Von Hippel. http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/sources.htm
Introduction to Information Retrieval - http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/html/htmledition/irbook.html
Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms - David MacKay. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.html
Introduction to Cybernetics - William Ross Ashby. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf
"Man-Computer Symbiosis" and "The Computer As A Communication Device" - J.C.R. Licklider. http://memex.org/licklider.pdf
Design For A Brain - William Ross Ashby. https://archive.org/details/designforbrainor00ashb
The Writings of Douglas Engelbart. http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/library.html
and if you like maths, don't miss this great list of free maths texts by George Cain: https://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.h...
- 1953 review of "Design for a brain" by W. Ross Ashby, https://www.jstor.org/stable/685995
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomeostatWhen a physiologist wants to investigate the working of the nervous system he normally examines samples of this system, dissects them, traces out all their ramifications, ascertains what physical and chemical changes they undergo while they are working, conducts sundry experiments on them, and thus acquires bit by bit a knowledge of the function of each component part and the way in which it works. Dr. Ross Ashby's approach is more theoretical. He has constructed a machine, which he calls a homeostat, the mechanism of which makes it behave in one respect somewhat like an animal or a human being adapting itself to its environment.> The homeostat is one of the first devices capable of adapting itself to the environment; it exhibited behaviours such as habituation, reinforcement and learning through its ability to maintain homeostasis in a changing environment. It was built by William Ross Ashby in 1948.. an adaptive ultrastable system, consisting of four interconnected Royal Air Force bomb control units with inputs, feedback, and magnetically driven, water-filled potentiometers. It illustrated his law of requisite variety — automatically adapting its configuration to stabilize the effects of any disturbances introduced into the system..
> When Alan Turing heard of Ashby's intention to build the homeostat, he wrote to Ashby to suggest that he could run a simulation on Turing's Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) instead of building a special machine.. In 1949 Time described it as "the closest thing to a synthetic brain so far designed by man".
Full text of book: https://archive.org/details/designforbrain00ashb
- Are you talking about the 2nd edition of "Design for a Brain"?
There are embarassingly many cybernetics books this could refer to (particularly from the midcentury)...
