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Clifford A. Pickover, ""

A collection of games and computer graphics is divided into sections dealing with pattern, games and speculation, music, space, time, and others and offers puzzles inspired by those dating back several centuries.

From Publishers Weekly

"Welcome to my computer zoo," writes Pickover ( Computers and the Imagination ), a salutation that at some point during his tour of more than 200 "mind mazes" begins to seem increasingly worthy of Lewis Carroll's Mad Queen or Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein. Fans of the Scientific American "Puzzling" column will recognize this book's genre, though it gradually, almost magically changes into something more challenging and weird. Pickover clearly enjoys the extra dimensions that computing affords recreational math puzzlers; he seems to have saved up a lifetime's worth of math teasers for this explosion-in-the-algorithmsp ok -factory collection. The length, complexity and level of difficulty varies wildly within the seven categories (from "Pattern" to "Weird Numbers"): some clearly require considerable knowledge and a PC to match, but just as many are more easily accessible and solvable. Enhanced by quirky design, this volume is the perfect tool with which to instill instant humility in any self-proclaimed math or computer whiz.

Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Pickover, a professional scientist with several earlier books to his credit, has published much material relating to computers, mathematics, and art that is not at a highly technical level. The present volume continues along the path of some of his earlier works ( Computers and the Imagination , LJ 11/1/91). It is a potpourri of mathematical brain teasers, miscellaneous factlets relating to music and mathematics, brief instructions relating to putting specific problems into a format solvable by a microcomputer, and various other short pieces too scattered in content to be readily characterized. This is not the sort of book that most readers will want to read through quickly and in exact order from beginning to end. However, Pickover provides much to reward sophisticated, selective browsers. Recommended for both public and academic libraries.

- Jack W. Weigel, Univ. of Michigan Lib., Ann Arbor

Biography

Summary: A wild and crazy math book

Rating: 5

This date stands at about 17 years after the book was written, and some of the stuff is just a fresh and crazy as when he wrote it.

The research, pictures, and drawings in this book is amazing.

You get a sort of through the looking glass sideways look at puzzles, mazes and just strange people and drawings

that he has dug up. I just read an A. K. Dewdney and compared it with a much later John Casti book. Comparing Dr. Pickover's work in this book to theirs,

is like the Harvard quad to Time Square...or MIT to Berkeley.

Open your mind for fun... of a mathematical, graphic or computer sort

and read.

Summary: It makes you run out of superlatives

Rating: 5

One could burn a great deal of thesaurus time searching for the left superlatives to describe this book. The third element in a series that will hopefully never end, it is an exciting combination of computer science, philosophy, and playfulness. Dr. Pickover can rightfully be labeled the "philosopher king" of the computer world.

As was the case in previous books, the primary focus is on the computer generation of images, but in this work the author skips down other avenues of mental exploration. Computer generated mazes, fractal music, fractal ant farms (think about whether the ants or the farms or both are what is fractal), caging fleas in Hyperspace, virtual reality, and strange chess problems are just some of the items that are discussed. Short pieces describing strange forms of art creation appear at regular intervals.

The only place where this reviewer thinks that the book stumbles is in the short science fiction story. However, it is conceded that this may be an instance of personal prejudice. This reviewer is a longtime reader of the genre, with an emphasis on the so-called big three of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. It may be unfair to compare anyone to those three.

The level of difficulty resembles a sine curve. Some passages require a good deal of knowledge in the area of math/computers, while others can be understood by anyone. All topics are well referenced, so anyone who wishes to explore further will have no trouble doing so. Questions designed to initiate further thought occur at the end of each essay.

Whatever your background and interests, you will find something of value in this book and both of the two previous ones, "Computers, Pattern, Chaos, and Beauty" and "Computers and the Imagination." To paraphrase an old advertising slogan, "no one can read just one."

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission.

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