"The Computer and the Brain" by John von Neumann

[dmm]

This is the last (and somewhat unfinished) short book by John von Neumann.

It's a short book, the PDF file is only 97 pages, the download link is visible from here: scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22The+computer+and+the+brain%22"

I've read this very interesting book during the last few days, and I'll record my impressions in the comments to this post.

Comments

[dmm]

It's all quite interesting, the rather tragic story of writing this book by von Neumann, how I learned about it recently, and its rather colloquial and informal language. The split between the "computer" and the "brain" parts of the book is not so obvious, von Neumann is trying to think about Hybrid Digital-Analog Devices throughout this book whenever possible, and the cross-influence of the two parts of the book is high.

I am going to record my impressions about the technical part of this book sequentially, and after I do that, I'll talk a bit about context (the history of its writing, how I learned about it, etc.).

Page numbers are pages in the PDF file (to obtain the corresponding page numbers of the paper book subtract 12 from them).