"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]

"pulsed density" system of representation of numbers he is talking about for some hybrid digital-analog systems on page 35 is essentially like neural rate coding.

then on page 36 he is talking about a leaky integrator for a condition trigger (this is, basically, the leaky integrate-and-fire scheme - amazingly enough, this is still in the "Computer" part of the book; we would expect to see something like this in the "Brain" part, and then it would be unsurprising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_neuron_model#Leaky_integrate-and-fire (what's interesting is that the leaky integrate-and-fire model goes back a long way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Lapicque )).