The Tinkertoy Computer by A.K. Dewdney.
After reading The Planiverse, I picked up a couple of Dewdney's other books. Published in 1993, this book is a compilation of some of his articles from the periodicals Scientific American and Algorithm.
The book contains 23 chapters organized into four themes. Of them, the following were my favorites:
Theme One: Matter Computes
- Chapter 1: The Tinkertoy computer - an account of a tinkertoy computer built by Daniel Hillis and others at MIT designed to play Tic-Tac-Toe.
- Chapter 2: The Rope-and-Pulley Wonder - methods for building boolean logic blocks out of ropes and pulleys.
- Chapter 6: Dance of the Tur-mites - Turing machines and cellular automata.
Theme Two: Matter Misbehaves
- Chapter 8: Star Trek Dynamics - implementation details of a 1970s era computer game.
- Chapter 9: Weather in a Jar - the Lorenz attractor and simple models demonstrating the behavior.
- Chapter 11: Designer Fractals - iterated function systems and their use for creating fractal patterns.
Theme Three: Mathematics Matters
- Chapter 13: Mathematical Morsels - a summary of mathematical puzzles by Ross Honsberger.
- Chapter 14: Golygon City - an introduction to golygons.
- Chapter 15: Scanning the Cat - a simple algorithm for reconstructing 2-D images from 1-D shadows.
- Chapter 16: Rigid Thinking - rigidity theory, and flexible nonconvex surfaces.
- Chapter 17: Automated Math - an algorithm for determining the rules for numerical sequences.
Theme Four: Computers Create
- Chapter 19: Chaos in A Major - the use of logistic maps to create chaotic music.
- Chapter 23: Latticeworks by Hand - algorithms for creating lattices.
As you can tell, I more or less enjoyed the entire book. This wasn't surprising given that I bought the book because it touched upon a number of topics that I find very interesting: complexity theory, fractals, math puzzles, physics simulations, geometric patterns, and algorithms.
I was, however, pleasantly surprised by the nostalgia invoked by the simple programs presented in the book. The short, simple BASIC programs reminded me of the many, many hours I spent programming 8bit computers during my adolescence. I still recall the feeling of awe that resulted from seeing simple programs like these produce seemingly "magical" results. Computing was much simpler then but no less rewarding - hopefully short but powerful programs like these aren't becoming a lost art.
