
The Strangest Book on the Theory of Computation (2009) - Hooke
http://recursed.blogspot.com/2009/07/strangest-book-on-theory-of-computation.html
======
erwan
What a coincidence.

Last week, I had a midterm that covered formal languages and automata theory.
I went to the Davis Centre Library at the University of Waterloo looking for
books on Automata Theory. I stumbled upon that very book. And though I
dismissed it because the formatting was horrible, I did notice its odd
epigraphs. I found the cover a bit mysterious and amusingly out of place, and
went with something else.

Now, I read here on Hacker News, a high-profile website, about this most
obscure review of this most obscure book written almost ten years ago - what's
more? The person who wrote the review is also the one that requested that the
library orders the book in the first place. He is one of my professors. Quite
frankly the personification of what you would hope a scholar and teacher to
be.

I know I have no reasons to feel agitated but why do I feel like this is the
prologue of a thriller?

~~~
benbreen
To make it more Borgesian for you, I have been baffled by the fact that the
author of _Automata Theory,_ Matthew Simon, has left almost no traces on
Google besides this book and one other book called _Emergent Computation,_
which is similarly eccentric. (Browsing it now, I came across a weird quote
about Pope Clement and self-flagellation, then it's right back to automata
theory again).

Could it be that he wrote under a pen name?

------
westoncb
I feel like there's something I'm missing: it doesn't make any sense that this
book would be published...

Reading some of the preview material at Amazon, the chapters often start with
brutal depictions of violence against African American slaves. I get no sense
of the purpose of these passages; they don't appear to be taking a stance in
anyway, just quoting from old sources.

The only charitable interpretation I can think of is something along the lines
I remember Asimov writing about: humankind always uses slaves; they stop when
it's economically viable to use machines instead. And in a way automata theory
is a very general theory of abstract machines which we use to substitute human
labor in many ways... So maybe he's giving a visceral reminder of the
importance of the subject matter at hand (automata theory)?

Additionally, the table of contents does look interesting. I've read Sipser,
and I'd now be interested in this different angle on the subject (Sipser felt
more isolated from other parts of mathematics; this starting out by connecting
to semigroups for instance seems interesting)—but that said, it's just too
bizarre:

Its 'Chapter 0,' titled "Mathematical Preliminaries," opens with a full-page
passage of the sort I described above. To give the flavor, here are a few
lines included in it:

 _"... Who are generally presented, being secur'd by Bastias or negro drivers,
And instantly tied Up to the Beams of the Plaza, or a Tree, Without so much as
being heard, When the flogging begins, men, women, or children, without
exception, on theyr long naked bodies, by long hempin whips that cut round at
every lash, and crack like a pistol, during which they alternately repeat
Dankee Massera, /Thank You Master/, but while he stalks up and down with his
overseer..."_

—and on and on. wtf.

The next page is the standard sort of presentation of mathematical notation
you'd expect.

~~~
zshrdlu
Does it _really_ bother you that much? Aren't you amused, even slightly?

~~~
westoncb
I don't mean to give the wrong impression: I'm actually highly amused by it.
But at the same time, as a heuristic for judging whether something I might
read is worthwhile or not... well, the author gives me the impression of being
slightly off his rocker, which makes me question whether I can trust the
material.

------
tern
Another fascinating and strange book on logic — The Laws of Form — is worth
tracking down. Even more strange, the only other book published by the author,
under a pseudonym.

~~~
erwan
Thanks for sharing, this is a fascinating topic I just started investigating.
Check out "Calculating Space" by Konrad Zuse (the inventor of the first
programmable computer). Coincidentally, he published in 1969 - "The Laws of
Form" was published the same year.

Link: ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/zuserechnenderraum.pdf

------
jayalpha
My knowledge of computation theory is not good enough to judge the book. Why
he used the strange quotes. Who knows. But he wrote more books. Like this one:

[https://www.amazon.com/Emergent-Computation-Emphasizing-
Bioi...](https://www.amazon.com/Emergent-Computation-Emphasizing-
Bioinformatics-Engineering-ebook/dp/B000WDQL9Y)

You can browse a little bin on google books:
[https://books.google.com.sg/books?id=d2i8q2PayrQC&pg=PR7&lpg...](https://books.google.com.sg/books?id=d2i8q2PayrQC&pg=PR7&lpg=PR7&dq=Automata+Theory++Matthew+Simon&source=bl&ots=bgQ0hSSBnF&sig=7SNMUVaNwbbKQBIUPE_cZXwmVeA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwifwJzntKreAhUGUlAKHSacASUQ6AEwCHoECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=Automata%20Theory%20%20Matthew%20Simon&f=false)

Must say, the content looks rather interesting to me. I am actually consider
buying it.

------
mysterypie
You can browse a few pages of the Simon book at this link supplied in the OP's
comments section[1]. It actually looks like a highly readable intro to
automata theory, and much more enjoyable than Hopcroft and Ullman's book
Introduction to Automata, Languages, and Computation that the OP himself
recommends in his comments. I found Hopcroft and Ullman to be a dull, formal
proof-based approach with few of the practical examples that one needs to get
an intuitive feel for a subject. The Simon book might be a bit of the opposite
--too many practical examples and not enough theory--but, hey, I would have
preferred that over Hopcroft and Ullman (or in addition to it).

Many of OP's objections come off as petty, like "the author uses the capital
letter "X" to represent ×, the cross product symbol." Come on, really? I think
the OP's _real_ reason for hating the book was the strange quotes Simon used;
it was a bad decision for Simon to use those quotes even if he had absolutely
no political agenda, because someone somewhere is going to take it the wrong
way, and academia being the leading edge of the politically correct movement
is especially dangerous.

[1]
[http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=ht...](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbooks.google.com%2Fbooks%3Fid%3DpGTpuWTIoNsC%26pg%3DPA5%26lpg%3DPA5%26dq%3D%2522White%2Band%2BNegro%2Bproduces%2Bmulatto%2522%26source%3Dbl%26ots%3DqrkM372LYY%26sig%3DoBiERDev99DMwQpO15wC5hyugIM%26hl%3Den%26ei%3Db9BTStSXAZ-
ltge06MymCA%26sa%3DX%26oi%3Dbook_result%26ct%3Dresult%26resnum%3D1&ei=b9BTStSXAZ-
ltge06MymCA&rct=j&q=%22White+and+Negro+produces+mulatto%22&usg=AFQjCNH6b3GY22Kti90ru8mFAr-6eAAgcA)

~~~
erwan
That's a bit unfair, Hopcroft and Ullman is extensive and detailed by design.
They invented the field AFAIK so this book ought to be deep as they use it to
lay its foundations. If you - or lurkers - are looking for a solid, down-to-
earth exploration of automata theory - but not so much proofs, then I would
recommend these in no particular order:

\- "Introduction to the Theory of Computation" [Part I] by M. Sipser

\- "Introduction to Compiler Design" by Torben A. Mogensen

\- "An introduction to Formal Languages and Automata" by P. Linz

\- "Languages and Machines" by Thomas A. Sudkamp

>Many of OP's objections come off as petty

I have had the book in my hands, I have turned the pages and seen the
typesetting myself. It's not an exaggeration. It looks like one of those books
written by a typewriter with some of the lines are misaligned, except it
wasn't and that is overall a pain to parse. Also the pages are small and
margins wide.

Why inflict that upon yourself when there are plenty of other books that show
a modicum of effort in editing.

------
jamesrcole
Given their assessment of the book, I don't see what the point was in even
bringing it up in the first place.

~~~
theoh
It's an oddity. How did it get published? How does the author manage to
maintain a professional career?

NB the person writing the blog had bought a copy, so it's effectively a
warning—and a negative review. Nothing inexplicable about that.

~~~
jamesrcole
FWIW, the reason it didn't seem to me worth mentioning is that it seems the
kind of book that no-one would get unless they'd seen it recommended.

~~~
theoh
The author of the blog post bought it based on a description in a catalog, so
evidently it seemed promising enough at least to them, and by the same token,
worth reporting on. So there's no mystery about why the blog author felt it
was worth making this post.

Curiosity value aside, buying an advanced textbook on spec based on the
specific topics it promises to cover doesn't seem that uncommon, particularly
if you are somehow isolated.

~~~
jamesrcole
IMO hardly anyone is going to purchase or even pay attention to something
unless they've seen some positive recommendations for it.

In a world of information-overload, I don't think it helps to call attention
to things that aren't worth other people's time.

~~~
theoh
OK, I get that you object to the blogger "surfacing" this book at all.

More generally, though, a lot of people pay attention to value cues like the
simple fact that something has been professionally published. With books, I'm
sure you would agree that there are multiple filters that people apply. The
general availability of a book attests to the fact that it passed some kind of
quality control, however feeble.

The general condition when it comes to reviewing is that the products are out
there anyway, so both positive and negative reviews are appropriate. The
tradition of literary book reviews (e.g. the NYRB, LRB) is to turn the review
into an timely essay, maybe cover a few recent releases, express an opinion,
pass on the most interesting facts etc. The point is to make the review a
self-contained literary work, capable of being read for its own sake, for
information or for pleasure.

I think that's what this blog post does, it takes something curious and makes
an entertaining story out of it. You might think that this isn't "worth other
people's time", in the sense that it doesn't advance an alternative, more
relevant approach to covering the book's subject matter. But the review is
potentially worth their time if it sheds light on anything (academic
eccentricity, the importance of typesetting in scholarly work, anxieties about
systemic racism in 21st C academic writing, etc.)

There's another discussion to be had about fields where negative reviews are
rare, like visual art. In that case, publishing any review at all does serve
to draw attention to/advertise/"surface" the artwork in question. Critics
aren't really able to distance themselves from the world of artists and
curators, so they can't really say anything too negative.

But that's a bit of a digression.

The book might not be worth people's time as a CS text. That doesn't mean the
blog post isn't worth their time as a reflection on other phenomena.

Underwood Dudley wrote multiple books about mathematical cranks. Cranks get a
bad press for wasting mathematicians' time and being impossible to convince of
the errors in their work. But isn't the phenomenon of crank culture
interesting, and couldn't it potentially teach us something about human
nature?

------
evanweaver
“Mirror Worlds” by David Gelernter if you want a weird CS book that contains
genuine insight.

------
EamonnMR
Seems to be overwhelmed by traffic.

------
charmides
Terrible textbooks are written all the time by cranks and eccentrics, and I
did not see how this book stood out from the rest.

------
amelius
Title seems to imply there's only one theory of computation.

~~~
erwan
_The_ Theory of Computation

vs.

 _The Theory_ of Computation

