"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:
> > As an aside, have you noted how often we refer to it as some kind of
> > bible? We better get more fundamental nanotech volumes out beside
> > _Liber N_ and _Liber NM_, or we will start to look like some hermetic
> > order revering the sacred scriptures :-)
>
> It *is* a bible. Drexler put a huge amount of work into making the book
> nearly perfect. If anyone cares to admonish me for admiring perfection,
> then they can take a meter-scale walk off a nanometer-scale pier.
I admire it too. It is one of the Important Books. But just because it
is nearly perfect (what does that really mean?) doesn't make it the
end - if we do our homework we (and maybe Drexler) will write books
that will go far beyond it, turning it into a classic but not state of
the art. Is there any effort around to create some book approximating
the current state of the art in nanotechnology? Of course, in vital
research fields those books tend to get written after the renaissance.
I'm hefting around Amit's _Modeling Brain Function: The World of
Attractor Neural Networks_ (1989) and Herz, Krogh & Palmer's _
Introduction to the Theory of Neural Computation_ (1991) quite a lot
these days. They are essentially the collected wisdom of the 80's
neural network revolution - old but still relevant.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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