Jason Brownlee: Clever Algorithms: Nature-Inspired Programming Recipes (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · algorithm, artificial intelligence, biology, code, genetics, mathematics, nature, programming, software
“This book provides a handbook of algorithmic recipes from the fields of Metaheuristics, Biologically Inspired Computation and Computational Intelligence that have been described in a complete, consistent, and centralized manner. These standardized descriptions were carefully designed to be accessible, usable, and understandable. Most of the algorithms described in this book were originally inspired by biological and natural systems, such as the adaptive capabilities of genetic evolution and the acquired immune system, and the foraging behaviors of birds, bees, ants and bacteria. An encyclopedic algorithm reference, this book is intended for research scientists, engineers, students, and interested amateurs. Each algorithm description provides a working code example in the Ruby Programming Language.”
First Edition. LuLu. January 2011
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License
ISBN 9781446785065
436 pages
Author (incl. source code and additional resources)
lulu.com
PDF (updated on 2013-3-24)
HTML
John Mullarkey: Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · affect, biology, empiricism, immanence, mathematics, monism, non-philosophy, ontology, phenomenology, philosophy, science, set theory, theory
Post-Continental Philosophy outlines the shift in Continental thought over the last 20 years through the work of four central figures: Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Henry, and François Laruelle. Though they follow seemingly different methodologies and agendas, each insists on the need for a return to the category of immanence if philosophy is to have any future at all. Rejecting both the German phenomenological tradition of transcendence (of the Ego, Being, Consciousness, Alterity, or Flesh), as well as the French Structuralist valorisation of Language, they instead take the immanent categories of biology (Deleuze), mathematics (Badiou), affectivity (Henry), and axiomatic science (Laruelle) as focal points for a renewal of thought. Consequently, Continental philosophy is taken in a new direction that engages science and nature with a refreshingly critical and non-reductive approach to life, set-theory, embodiment, and knowledge. However, each of these new philosophies of immanence still regards what the other is doing as transcendent representation, raising the question of what this return to immanence really means. John Mullarkey’s analysis provides a startling answer. By teasing out their internal differences, he discovers that the only thing that can be said of immanence without falling back into transcendent representation seems not to be a saying at all but a ‘showing’, a depiction through lines. Because each of these philosophies also places a special value on the diagram, the common ground of immanence is that occupied by the philosophical diagram rather than the word. The heavily illustrated final chapter of the book literally outlines how a mode of philosophical discourse might proceed when using diagrams to think immanence.
Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006
Transversals: New Directions in Philosophy series
ISBN 0826464610, 9780826464613
260 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-9-6)
Comments (2)John Avery: Information Theory and Evolution (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · bioinformatics, biology, biosemiotics, entropy, evolution, information technology, information theory
This highly interdisciplinary book discusses the phenomenon of life, including its origin and evolution (and also human cultural evolution), against the background of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory. Among the central themes is the seeming contradiction between the second law of thermodynamics and the high degree of order and complexity produced by living systems. This paradox has its resolution in the information content of the Gibbs free energy that enters the biosphere from outside sources, as the author shows. The role of information in human cultural evolution is another focus of the book. One of the final chapters discusses the merging of information technology and biotechnology into a new discipline — bio-information technology.
Publisher World Scientific, 2003
ISBN 9812383999, 9789812383990
Length 217 pages