Not
many books can keep me engaged from front to back cover and I can honestly say
that W. Daniel Hillis did a great job in keeping me interested from beginning
to end with his book The Pattern on the
Stone. It gave me a straight answer
to one of the questions that I have always had while growing up - how do
computers work? He gave me a new
perspective on the concept of computers, one specifically was the computer made
out of water pipes and valves. He explained
that with infinite resources and time I could build a computer like the one I
have on my desktop out of water pipes, water valves, and use water to pass
through the pipes to switch the valves on and off. The computer that I use to play Star Wars: The Old Republic, watch and
edit movies, compose music, and use to write applications, that one. This water pipe computer will probably be the
size of New York city when I'm done building it and probably be only as fast as
the water current that is switching the valves on and off, but none the less it
will be a complete and working computer made out of something that I would have
never imagined before reading this book.
After
the water pipe computer concept was stuck in my head I Googled "computers
that are made from other materials" and I found a computer that is made
from DNA and other biological molecules.
These computers are called bimolecular computers and are the smallest
computers in the world; they are so small that a trillion fit in a single drop
of water. One version of this device can
detect cancer in a test tube and releases a molecule to destroy it. This is not a science fiction concept in a
new George Lucas film, this is happening right now. And this happened back in 2004 so this is an
old technology; imagine what new innovations we have today. This to me is mind blowing.
In
my close circle of friends, all of us are computer Gods in one way or the other
and I think this book will give my friends an insight that they would enjoy
just like it did with me. I would recommend
it to my friends in a heartbeat so we could engage in a variety of interesting
conversations about computers. I'm
confident each of my friends will find a different chapter that pulls them in
and will bring something different to our conversation and enlighten each other
with new and exciting information. And
that is what I enjoyed most about this book - each chapter is different and
brings a wide variety of information to the reader.
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