Computers have completely changed the way we teach children. We have Mindstorms to thank for that. In this book, first published in 1980, pioneering computer scientist Seymour Papert uses the invention of LOGO, the first child-friendly programming language, to make the definitive case for the educational value computer programming. Papert argues that children are more than capable of mastering computers, and that teaching computational processes like de-bugging in the classroom can change the way we learn everything else. He also shows that schools saturated with technology can actually improve socialization and interaction among students and between students and teachers. Papert is not interested in specifically preparing children for careers in computer science. Rather, Mindstorms makes the case that computation offers a uniquely practical way of developing a child's problem-solving and quantitative reasoning skills. This new edition will also include an extensive introduction by Mitchel Resnick, a former student of Papert's and one of today's leaders in computer literacy, which will introduce the wisdom of Papert's research to a new generation of readers. Technology changes every day, but the basic ways that computers can help us learn remain. Mindstorms stands as the bible of computer literacy, a book that has helped thousands of teachers and parents harness the power of computation and teach their children to think both clearly and creatively.

The first systematic study of parallelism in computation by two pioneers in the field. Reissue of the 1988 Expanded Edition with a new foreword by Leon Bottou In 1969, ten years after the discovery of the perceptron-which showed that a machine could be taught to perform certain tasks using examples-Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert published Perceptrons, their analysis of the computational capabilities of perceptrons for specific tasks. As Leon Bottou writes in his foreword to this edition, "Their rigorous work and brilliant technique does not make the perceptron look very good." Perhaps as a result, research turned away from the perceptron. Then the pendulum swung back, and machine learning became the fastest-growing field in computer science. Minsky and Papert's insistence on its theoretical foundations is newly relevant. Perceptrons-the first systematic study of parallelism in computation-marked a historic turn in artificial intelligence, returning to the idea that intelligence might emerge from the activity of networks of neuron-like entities. Minsky and Papert provided mathematical analysis that showed the limitations of a class of computing machines that could be considered as models of the brain. Minsky and Papert added a new chapter in 1987 in which they discuss the state of parallel computers, and note a central theoretical challenge: reaching a deeper understanding of how "objects" or "agents" with individuality can emerge in a network. Progress in this area would link connectionism with what the authors have called "society theories of mind."

Writings by a thinker-a psychiatrist, a philosopher, a cybernetician, and a poet-whose ideas about mind and brain were far ahead of his time. Warren S. McCulloch was an original thinker, in many respects far ahead of his time. McCulloch, who was a psychiatrist, a philosopher, a teacher, a mathematician, and a poet, termed his work "experimental epistemology." He said, "There is one answer, only one, toward which I've groped for thirty years: to find out how brains work." Embodiments of Mind, first published more than fifty years ago, teems with intriguing concepts about the mind/brain that are highly relevant to recent developments in neuroscience and neural networks. It includes two classic papers coauthored with Walter Pitts, one of which applies Boolean algebra to neurons considered as gates, and the other of which shows the kind of nervous circuitry that could be used in perceiving universals. These first models are part of the basis of artificial intelligence. Chapters range from "What Is a Number, that a Man May Know It, and a Man, that He May Know a Number," and "Why the Mind Is in the Head," to "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" (with Jerome Lettvin, Humberto Maturana, and Walter Pitts), "Machines that Think and Want," and "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" (with Walter Pitts). Embodiments of Mind concludes with a selection of McCulloch's poems and sonnets. This reissued edition offers a new foreword and a biographical essay by McCulloch's one-time research assistant, the neuroscientist and computer scientist Michael Arbib.