The brain makers

Name: The brain makers
ISBN: 9780672304125

H. P. Newquist · 1994

AI & Machine Learning Startups & Entrepreneurship Electronics & Hardware

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4recommend

6mentions

5people

2017–2024years

67% recommend33% neutral

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What Hacker News says

jhbadgerJun 2024
H.P. Newquist's "The Brain Makers: Genius, Ego, and Greed In The Search For Machines That Think" (1994) is a good book that centers on the second AI bubble (1980-1987) and its collapse. It is maybe a bit too focused on the companies and CEOs themselves rather than the technology, but it does cover the main problem of expert systems -- their brittleness when faced with a situation they haven't been designed for. One of the things that we learned with expert systems is it is better to have probabilistic weights for things rather than the IF THEN ELSE branches of a traditional expert system -- this led to things like Bayesian models which were popular before deep learning took over.
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PeterStuerApr 2023
The rivalry and sabotage are well docomented in the book 'The Brain Makers: The History of Artificial Intelligence – Genius, Ego, And Greed In The Quest For Machines That Think' by HP Newquist. A fairly good read even though the author has a very US centric view.
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pinewurstMay 2020
HP Newquist, The Brain Makers from 1994. It matches my memories of the last AI boom quite well.
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hydandataMar 2020
In no particular order:
Sunburst and Luminary: an Apollo Memoir https://www.sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html
The Brain Makers https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Makers-HP-Newquist/dp/067230412...
Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence https://www.amazon.com/Strategic-Computing-Machine-Intellige...
The Soul of a New Machine https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine/dp/B01FCTJCR0
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution-An...
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/B00AQU7...
Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEn... Not a dedicated history book, but Hamming talks a lot about personal experiences and observations
UNIX: A History and a Memoir https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan-e...
Masters of Doom https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cult... linking to audiobook because it is read by Wil Wheaton :)
Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wires-Adventures-Worlds-Wanted/...
It might be just me, but I really enjoy reading biographies of people important to the science, for example here is one for John Tukey https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.2003...
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PeterStuerApr 2023
I'm the lucky owner of a Spartan 1962 edition of Frank Rosenblatt's Principles of Neurodynamics (there was a time University Libraries sold out their inventories for peanuts, and you'd find these pearls amongst the trash).
I still chuckle though at the anecdote in "The Brain Makers" book about the Blatt being used around the AI-Lab as a unit of body odor.
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sedachvJan 2017
Here are a few of the books on my bookshelf that are not available as ebooks for purchase and would probably be very hard to find pirated copies of:
```
    The Psychology of Computer Programming
    The Paralation Model
    Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction
    Object-Oriented Programming in Common Lisp
    Computer-Aided Financial Analysis (Miller)
    Probability, Statistics, and Queueing Theory (Allen)
    The Brain Makers
```
Note that I sold off most of my library and regularly sell books once I am done reading them, so this is just a small sample of the material that you will not find online, that I have personally read. Also all the older/rare books I have borrowed from/read at my local public library (public libraries have a surprising amount of computer books), and the university libraries I have been associated with earlier.
Whoever discounts computer science books today because "you can find it all online" does so out of a very deep ignorance of computer science. Between Google Books and the Internet Archive's scanning project digital copies do exist, but are inaccessible.
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