The genesis of the digital idea and why it transformed civilizationA few short decades ago we were informed by the smooth signals of analog television, radio, and vinyl discs; communicated with our analog telephones; and even computed with analog computers. Today our world is digital, built with zeros and ones. Why did this revolution occur? The Discrete Charm of the Machine explains, in an engaging and accessible manner, the varied physical and logical reasons behind this radical transformation. The spark of individual genius shines through this story of innovation: the stored program of Jacquard's loom; the logical branching of Charles Babbage; Alan Turing's brilliant abstraction of the discrete machine; Harry Nyquist's foundation for digital signal processing; Claude Shannon's breakthrough insights into the meaning of information and bandwidth; and Richard Feynman's prescient proposals for nanotechnology and quantum computing. Ken Steiglitz follows the progression of these ideas in the building of our digital world, from the internet and artificial intelligence to the edge of the unknown. Are questions like the famous traveling salesman problem truly beyond the reach of ordinary digital computers? Can quantum computers transcend these barriers? Does a mysterious magical power reside in the analog mechanisms of the brain? Steiglitz concludes by confronting the moral and aesthetic questions raised by the development of artificial intelligence and autonomous robots. The Discrete Charm of the Machine examines why our information technology, the lifeblood of our civilization, became digital, and challenges us to think about where its future trajectory may lead.

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• To the Reader
• Part I / A Century of Valves
  • 1 The Discrete Revolution
    • 1.1 My Golden Age of Garbage
    • 1.2 Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Technology
    • 1.3 Some Terminology
  • 2 What’s Wrong with Analog?
    • 2.1 Signals and Noise
    • 2.2 Reproduction and Storage
    • 2.3 The Origins of Noise
    • 2.4 Thermal Noise in Electronics
    • 2.5 Other Noise in Electronics
    • 2.6 Digital Immunity
    • 2.7 Analog Rot
    • 2.8 Caveats
  • 3 Signal Standardization
    • 3.1 A Reminiscence
    • 3.2 Ones and Zeros
    • 3.3 Directivity of Control
    • 3.4 Gates
    • 3.5 The Electron
    • 3.6 Edison’s Lightbulb Problems
    • 3.7 De Forest’s Audion
    • 3.8 The Vacuum Tube as Valve
    • 3.9 The Rest of Logic
    • 3.10 Clocks and Doorbells
    • 3.11 Memory
    • 3.12 Other Ways to Build Valves
  • 4 Consequential Physics
    • 4.1 When Physics Became Discrete
    • 4.2 The Absolute Size of Things
    • 4.3 The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
    • 4.4 Explaining Wave-Particle Duality
    • 4.5 The Pauli Exclusion Principle
    • 4.6 Atomic Physics
    • 4.7 Semiconductors
    • 4.8 The P-N Junction
    • 4.9 The Transistor
    • 4.10 Quantum Tunneling
    • 4.11 Speed
  • 5 Your Computer Is a Photograph
    • 5.1 Room at the Bottom
    • 5.2 The Computer as Microphotograph
    • 5.3 Heisenberg in the Chip Foundry
    • 5.4 Moore’s Law and the Time of Silicon:ca. 1960–?
    • 5.5 The Exponential Wall
• Part II / Sound and Pictures
  • 6 Music from Bits
    • 6.1 The Monster in 1957
    • 6.2 A Chance Encounter with a D-to-A Converter
    • 6.3 Sampling and Monsieur Fourier
    • 6.4 Nyquist’s Sampling Principle
    • 6.5 Another Win for Digital
    • 6.6 Another Isomorphism
  • 7 Communication in a Noisy World
    • 7.1 Claude Shannon’s 1948 Paper
    • 7.2 Measuring Information
    • 7.3 Entropy
    • 7.4 Noisy Channels
    • 7.5 Coding
    • 7.6 The Noisy Coding Theorem
    • 7.7 Another Win for Digital
• Part III / Computation
  • 8 Analog Computers
    • 8.1 From the Ancient Greeks
    • 8.2 More Ingenious Devices
    • 8.3 Deeper Questions
    • 8.4 Computing with Soap Films
    • 8.5 Local and Global
    • 8.6 Differential Equations
    • 8.7 Integration
    • 8.8 Lord Kelvin’s Research Program
    • 8.9 The Electronic Analog Computer
  • 9 Turing’s Machine
    • 9.1 The Ingredients of a Turing Machine
    • 9.2 The All-Analog Machine
    • 9.3 The Partly Digital Computer
    • 9.4 A Reminiscence: The Stored-Program Loom in New Jersey
    • 9.5 Monsieur Jacquard’s Loom
    • 9.6 Charles Babbage
    • 9.7 Babbage’s Analytical Engine
    • 9.8 Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace
    • 9.9 Turing’s Abstraction
  • 10 Intrinsic Difficulty
    • 10.1 Being Robust
    • 10.2 The Polynomial/Exponential Dichotomy
    • 10.3 Turing Equivalence
    • 10.4 Two Important Problems
    • 10.5 Problems with Easily Checked Certificates (NP)
    • 10.6 Reducing One Problem to Another
    • 10.7 Yes/No Problems
    • 10.8 Cook’s Theorem: 3-SAT Is NP-Complete
    • 10.9 Thousands More NP-Complete Problems
  • 11 Searching for Magic
    • 11.1 Analog Attacks on NP-Complete Problems
    • 11.2 The Missing Law
    • 11.3 The Church-Turing Thesis
    • 11.4 The Extended Church-Turing Thesis
    • 11.5 Locality: From Einstein to Bell
    • 11.6 Behind the Quantum Curtain
    • 11.7 Quantum Hacking
    • 11.8 The Power of Quantum Computers
    • 11.9 Life Itself
    • 11.10 The Uncertain Limits of Computation
• Part IV / Today and Tomorrow
  • 12 The Internet, Then the Robots
    • 12.1 Ideas
    • 12.2 The Internet: Packets, Not Circuits
    • 12.3 The Internet: Photons, Not Electrons
    • 12.4 Enter Artificial Intelligence
    • 12.5 Deep Learning
    • 12.6 Obstacles
    • 12.7 Enter Robots
    • 12.8 The Problem of Consciousness
    • 12.9 The Question of Values
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index