Mr Berlinski has somehow managed to write a book on a very interesting subject which is almost impossible to read . Though he seems to be very knowledgeable about the topic at hand, instead of sticking to the objective, concise and entertaining style that is quite common among today's good science history writers, he has chosen to wander into the dark corners of the jungles of prose. Many diversions Mr. Berlinski branches into on almost every other page makes it nearly impossible to follow the subject matter. His labyrinthic prose complicates the already difficult task of trying to concentrate on this book beyond a patience level that can be considered reasonable. This is probably one of the few modern non-fiction books where it is not uncommon to run into sentences that runs for 120 words or more (believe me I counted several of them) on every other page. The Advent of the Algorithm must have put its unfortunate editor to sleep many times as he was struggling to make his way through the material as it contains a pretty generous collection of typos and other mistakes in the formulas and expressions presented.

"The Advent of the Algorithm" is supposed to describe the evolution of the concept of algorithm. The book starts by outlining the contributions of various mathematicians like Leibnitz, Fourier and Euler made to define irrational and transcendental numbers in terms of a series of arithmetic calculations. It is pretty difficult to follow the logical progression from there on. There is a bit about Hilbert and his famous "20 mathematical problems", Bertrand Russell and his Principia Mathematica which was an effort to build a consistent framework for mathematics, and Godel's incompleteness theorem which destroyed this effort. There are more bits and pieces about Alonzo Church's contributions to symbolic logic and Alan Turing's simple theoretical machine that could carry out any computation that is logically possible, which later became the litmus test for computability. Toward the end, the author gets into a discussion of neural networks, genetics and complexity, and the reader finally reaches the best part of this book: The End.

"The Advent of the Algorithm" would certainly be a "one-star" book if it wasn't for the generous collection of interesting historical facts that are sprinkled throughout. The only way a reader may be able to tolerate this book would be by quickly glancing over the long sections of endless digressions of the author. This book may also be useful for those having insomnia problems. Read just two or three pages and soon you will be sleeping like a baby.

I can't wait until one of the better science authors like Simon Singh or Ivars Peterson chooses to write a book on the same subject.


Recommended: No