"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]

Another interesting subsection is "THE PRINCIPLE OF ONLY ONE ORGAN FOR EACH BASIC OPERATION", page 25.

First of all, he is calling parts of machines "organs" throughout the text; so he is really thinking about those machines as "artificial animals".

Then he notes that for analog machines one uses many copies of organs performing the same basic operation unlike typical serial digital computers of his time (so neural nets and other neural machines are more like analog computers; this will also be apparent later in the text; my own paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.07447 also traces the origins of our approach to neuromorphic computations and neural machines to analog computers, Section 11.2 page 24).