Book Review: Introduction to Information Science

Introduction to Quantum Information Science

Quantum mechanics, at least at some instrumental level, can be viewed as a modification of the probability theory. We replace positive numbers (probabilities) with complex numbers z (probability amplitudes) such that the squares of their absolute values, |z|2, are interpreted as probabilities. The rules for combining amplitudes are very reminiscent of the rules for combining probabilities. z1 z2

Book Review: “Introduction to Artificial Life”

Despite the popularity of artificial life over the last 15 years or so, as witnessed by the establishment of several international conferences on the subject and the birth of the Artificial Life Journal and similar publications, there has been a conspicuous lack of decent introductory texts on the subject. Notable exceptions include “Artificial Life: An Introduction” (Langton 1995), an eclectic...

Identity page of Social Science Quarterly Book Review

Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science - A Review

literature and theories put forth to date. Thagard summarizes results of research to date: “the central hypothesis of cognitive science: Thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures” (p. 10). He uses a shorthand notation for this approach: the computational-representational understanding of mind...

Book Review: Introduction to Information Retrieval by Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schütze

Introduction to Information Retrieval by Manning, Raghavan, and Schütze is an up-to-date, thorough, and systematic introduction to information retrieval (IR) from a computer science perspective. Written as a textbook, its main audience is graduate and senior undergraduate students taking IR courses. The book will also be valuable to researchers in other computer science fields, such as computat...