Darwin among the machines

What Hacker News says

1. setgreeFeb 2025
   I learned about Butler and his letter from George Dyson's book, "Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence" -- it's a very entertaining account. Butler was quite a character.

   (If I recall correctly I learned about Dyson's book from a postscript to Neal Stephenson's "Quicksilver.")

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2. andyjohnson0Jun 2023
   +1 for The Information - a great book.

   Gleick's biography of Richard Feynman, Genius is also excellent. And Chaos and Time Travel: A History, although the latter looks at the subject from literary and philosophical perspectives as well as science.

   Pair with Darwin Among the Machines and Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson.

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3. al_hagMay 2022
   Not self-help books really but I can recommend the George Dyson trilogy for inspiration/perspective.

   Darwin Among the Machines

   Turing’s Cathedral

   Analogia

   I would also look into the possibility of attending a guided hallucinogen session a la Pollan

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4. kbr2000Apr 2020
   I can recommend to get a copy of

   * Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer Revolution, by Lamont Wood.

   * The Soul of A New Machine, by Tracy Kidder.

   * Books by George Dyson (son of ...): Darwin Among the Machines, Turing's Cathedral. (unrelated, but also give Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship a go)

   * The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, by Leslie Berlin.

   * Richard Feynman Computer Heuristics Lecture at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA

   * Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, by Thierry Bardini.

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5. qubexMar 2020
   What strikes me in both the original article and the post is the failure to recognise that a strong form of selective pressure is being applied upon software, and that adaptive processes (of which evolution is but a single example) tend to optimise for the criterion that is being selected for even in absence of an overarching design (‘proof’). I recommend reading Darwin Among the Machines for comparison to hardware.
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6. captnswingJul 2015
   check out George Dyson's great book of the same title that covers Butlers' essay in detail

   Very recommended reading

   http://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Among-The-Machines-Intelligence...

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