http://aurellem.org/thoughts/html/sussman-reading-list.html Prof. Sussman's Reading List aurellem * read the blog >> Written by: Gerald Sussman (compiled by Robert McIntyre) Serving as a TA for Professor Sussman will get you three things: great advice, spectacular reading recommendations, and lots of high quality tea. I can't share the advice or the tea, but I can compile a reading list. Some of the materials on this list represent research paths that lead to unexplored territory. Some are textbooks that express concepts so clearly they will change your life and make you weep for joy. I hope that you will get something interesting out of this reading list, wherever you are in life - there's stuff I wish I knew about in middle school, and there are things I can't wait to read this summer. Enjoy! (and send corrections to reading-list@aurellem.org!) -Robert McIntyre 1 Some Real High school Reading * A First Course in General Relativity, by Bernard F Schultz + ISBN: 9780521277037 + Readable, not too heavy. + Minimal dependencies + You can just go through it slowly and understand at each step. * Space and Time in Special Relativity, by David Mermin + ISBN: 0881334200 + HIGHLY accessible. + This will change your life. + You will understand special relativity! * The Feynman Lectures on Physics + Highly understandable + Just go there and learn something already! * Society of Mind, by Marvin Minsky + A trove of wonderful ideas! * Quantum Computing since Democritus, by Scott Aaronson + Everything you might want to know about computing with QM, with a philosophical outlook. * Bible, Talmud, Koran + Read them whether or not you believe them! + Be sure to read between the lines, and you can discover what people were actually thinking back then. + Very interesting documents! + Bava Metzia 59b is an interesting story! 2 Representative Student Theses These are students where I played a large role in their education. Many of them represent compelling research directions that desperately need to be extended by the next generation of researchers! As Minsky says, if you want to do something really new, go back to points in the past where there was a neat idea that never really caught on, and follow the path of that idea to see where it leads. A comprehensive list of all my student's works can be found at my homepage. -Prof. Sussman In particular, here's two great ideas that seem extremely promising and have NOT been properly explored! You could be the first person to get them working! * Using chaos to get unlimited measurement precision! + In chaotic systems, states that are near to each other at one point in time become exponentially farther apart from each other as the system evolves in time. Therefore, you might be able to attain arbitrary precision by waiting for the system to evolve, and then determining what initial state must have led to the later state. + Two notable papers: o A Global Approach to Parameter Estimation of Chaotic Dynamical Systems, by Athanassios G. Siapas, 1992. o Parameter Estimation in Chaotic Systems, by Elmer Hung, 1995. + No one put enough effort into seeing if it really worked. + Seems to allow for almost unlimited precision in measurement. + Initial results look very promising, with a 13 order of magnitude improvement in measurement precision in a simple experiment. + You will win the Nobel Prize if you can get it to work, because you will revolutionize the way we do measurements. In particular, you could measure the Gravitational Constant with unprecedented accuracy. * Towards Intelligent Structures: Active Control of Buckling + By Andrew A. Berlin, 1994 + Achieves a 10 fold increase in strength by actively eliminating vibrational modes. + Such a good idea; It's cool, short - great! + Better quality, color version of the thesis here. + No one's followed up on it! In historical order: * A System for Representing and Using Real-World Knowledge + By Scott Elliot Fahlman, 1977 + Basically the reason that the Connection Machine was later invented. * The Connection Machine + By Danny Hillis, 1981 + Beautiful thesis, though it doesn't tell you anything you can really do today. * A Circuit Grammar For Operational Amplifier Design + By Andrew Ressler, 1984 + If you're an Electrical Engineering person. * ONTIC: A Knowledge Representation System for Mathematics + By David A. McAllester, 1987 + Very hard, very deep. + You will need to know a lot of Math. * KAM: Automatic Planning and Interpretation of Numerical Experiments Using Geometrical Methods + By Kenneth Man-Kam Yip, 1989 + Coolest PhD thesis ever! + Solve problems using graphs. + So cool! * Botanical Computing: A Developmental Approach to Generating Interconnect Topologies on an Amorphous Computer + By Daniel Coore, 1999 + Interesting to programmers especially. * Programmable Self-Assembly: Constructing Global Shape using Biologically-inspired Local Interactions and Origami Mathematics By Radhika Nagpal, 2001 + Also Interesting to programmers. * Cellular Computation and Communications using Engineered Genetic Regulatory Networks + By Ron Weiss, 2001 + Third in a line of bio / amorphous computing papers which should be highly interesting to programmers. * An Algorithm for Bootstrapping Communications + By Jake Beal, 2001 + Seems like it could be "the right thing" for how modules in the brain learn to talk to each other. + Someone should expand on this work! + Also a PhD thesis from Beal on this: Learning by Learning to Communicate, 2007 * Games, Puzzles, and Computation + By Robert Aubrey Hearn, 2006. * Propagation Networks: A Flexible and Expressive Substrate for Computation + By Alexey Andreyevich Radul, 2009 + Is a completely new way to program computers. + Under active development. You can get the latest code here. 3 From Sussman's Bookshelf: * Introductory Network Theory, by A.G. Bose and K.N. Stevens + ASIN: B0000CMXS1 + Get the real story about RLC circuits! + Obsolete - it only covers linear circuits. * Linear and Nonlinear Circuits, by Chua, Desoler, and Kuh + ISBN: 0070108986 + More up-to-date than Network Theory + 10/10 would teach + Mathematically very clear * The Art of Electronics, by Horowitz & Hill + ASIN: B001ERDQVI + Practical + Beautiful * Analysis and Design of Analog Integrated Circuits, by Grey and Meyer + ISBN: 0471574953 + Get the 2nd or 3rd edition, not later ones. * A Survey of Modern Algebra, by Garrett Birkhoff and Saunders MacLane + ISBN: 9781568814544 + Goes all the way to Galois Theory! + Clear! * Visual Complex Analysis, Needham + ISBN: 0198534469 + Easy reading, well written + Wonderful use of graphics! * Solid Shape, Jan Koenderink + ISBN: 026211139X + Just good! * Probability: the Logic of Science, by E.T. Jaynes + ISBN: 9780521592710 + OMG just read this already! + Here's some links to the book. + This book will change your life, and make probability make sense. Truly excellent book. + Why aren't you reading this!? * Calculus on Manifolds, Spivak + ISBN: 9780805390216 + Great Mathematical notation! + Was an inspiration for SICM. + Book contains a great flame! * The Variational Principles of Mechanics, by Cornelius Lanczos + ISBN: 0486650677 + Very philosophic; deep. + You could read it 100 times and learn something new each time! * Computers and Thought, by Edward A. Feigenbaum (Editor), Julian Feldman (Editor). + ISBN: 0262560925 + This book includes some of the very interesting early papers in AI, and is overall a great book. Of course, some of the included papers are not very interesting. * The Configuration Space Method for Kinematic Design of Mechanisms , by Elisha Sacks and Leo Joskowicz + ISBN: 9780262013895 + I learned a lot reading this. * Principles of Development, by Wolpert + ISBN: 0199554285 * A Genetic Switch, by Mark Ptashne + ISBN: 0865423156 + Such clarity! + Lecture Series Based on the book! * The Making of a Fly, by Peter A. Lawrence + ISBN: 0632030488 + Probably out of date already, but very well written! * Pattern Formation: Ciliate Studies and Models, by Joseph Frankel + ISBN: 0195048903 + My type of book! * The Harmonic Mind, Volumes 1 and 2, by Smolenck and Legendre + ISBN: 9780262516198 + I'm very interested in the amazing latency of the human brain. This book presents a way by which multiple stages of computation can be folded together into a single computation, and is an interesting hypothesis about how the mind might work! * The Radio Amateur's Handbook, ARRL + practical electronics book + They've been making this book for about 100 years! * Radiotron Designer's Handbook, 4th edition, RCA + ASIN: B000JILVH4 + I'm very interested in hi-fi. 4 Marvin Minsky Minsky really made me as a person. He was my adviser when I was a student at MIT, and he got me my first job. He had the "magnetism" to attract the most talented people to MIT to work on AI, and the right amount of negligence and delegation to create an environment where people could thrive. He is certainly the reason that I was seduced into working on AI. Minsky has vast and deep Scientific knowledge - he could walk into almost any class: Chemistry, Physics, Math, Computer Science, and teach the class well without preparation! -Prof. Sussman * http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/ Much of Minsky's work is here, including his book, The Emotion Machine, and several essays and papers. Check it out! * Society of Mind Read it online! Each chapter of this book is a short, self-contained essay about some aspect of intelligence or development. * Music, Mind, and Meaning Minsky is one of a few living people who can improvise complicated Baroque era fugues. You can hear one of these improvisations here. * Steps towards Artificial Intelligence Here, Minsky outlines how we might begin to build an AI. This is considered to be one of the founding papers of the field, along with Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" paper. * Perceptrons, by Marvin Minsky + MIT Press, ISBN: 9780262631112 + Really good for "Math types." + Uses geometry for proving things. + People unwisely considered it to kill off Neural Nets; In fact, it only shows the limitations of certain simple kinds of Neural Nets. 5 For Fun * Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point, by Huw Price + ISBN: 0195117980 + A reasonable philosopher! * Was Einstein Right? : Putting General Relativity To The Test, by Clifford M. Will + ISBN: 0465090869 * Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein + ISBN: 0441790348 * Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy + ISBN: 1449388396 + Accuracy is not too good - people's names are spelled wrong, for example. + But the feelings are exactly right! "This book really captures what it was like to be in the AI lab back in the good old days." 6 Selected works by Sussman * SICM (Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics) This is the textbook of 6.946, a class in Classical Mechanics that Sussman generally teaches in the Fall. + ISBN: 9780262194556 + MIT Press * SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) This is the textbook of the (no longer offered) 6.001 introductory Computer Science class at MIT. It's a classic! + ISBN: 0-262-01077-1 * R5RS (Revised^5 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme) Spec. for the scheme computer language. Sussman is very proud of the short length of this document compared to the specifications for most other computer languages. It's based on the Revised Report on the Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Algol 60 * Functional Differential Geometry Treatment of functional differential geometry in the classic SIC[M/P] style. Author: Gerald Sussman (compiled by Robert McIntyre) Created: 2016-07-13 Wed 00:16 Emacs 24.5.1 (Org mode 8.3beta) Validate