Science, Computers, and the Information Onslaught

Science, Computers, and the Information Onslaught: A Collection of Essays covers the proceedings of the 1981 meeting on “Science and the Information Onslaught”, held at Los Alamos, New Mexico. This book is organized into five parts encompassing 19 chapters. The first part deals with the problems of measurement and the uses of information in decisions concerning national security. This part also emphasizes the dependence of survival on technological progress. The next part examines the foundations of information theory, the interaction between psychological concepts and the mathematical theories of automata, and the major problems in robotics. These topics are followed by discussions of the efforts to codify languages in formal grammatical systems and the past misuse of irrelevantly detailed information in decision making, specifically the use and misuse of information in government decisions about technological projects. The remaining parts consider the project of enhancing human abilities by the insertion of silicon chips in the body. These parts also assess the implications of a microelectronic technology capable of producing chips bearing millions of logically active circuit elements. Accounts of cryptanalytic successes in World War II are also included. This book will be of value to mathematicians, physicists, linguistics, and computer scientists.