The introductory chapter of this book, called 'there is something about chips' encourages a response of 'especially with salt and vinegar', but the reality we are presented with in this analysis of the importance of computer chips to technology and the world economy is more reminiscent of another edible delight: the banana. Bananas are hugely popular, but the world supply is fragile because it is largely dependent on a monoculture. A single cultivar, the Cavendish, makes up over 99 per cent of exports to developed countries. These bananas have very little genetic diversity as they are propogated by cloning. This leaves them open to devastating attack, most likely by a fungal disease, which could wipe out the worldwide supply. Similarly, when it comes to IT, more than 90 per cent of advanced chips are made by a single company, TMSC, based in Taiwan. Not only does this concentration put supply at risk, Taiwan's difficult political position, with the danger of being su...

Of all the big name IT people, none is revered in quite the same way as Steve Jobs was by Apple fans. But it's easy to forget that for a formative period in his career, Jobs was pushed out of Apple, starting NeXT, a startup to produce high power workstations. Taking a handful of top people with him, Jobs faced a legal onslaught for a few months from Apple - but given they had no product, not even a design, he was able to continue with the production of one of the most remarkably brilliant failures in IT history. The NeXT box solidified what was great and awful about Jobs - his far sighted ideas and his obsession with detail that led, for instance, to spending $100,000 on the logo design alone, something no startup could afford. Although the final product was brilliant, it was too expensive and too different from everything else to succeed. Geoffrey Cain gives us excellent chapter and verse on the whole episode that is often brushed over in Jobs' history. It's a reminder, ap...

Ever since computers became useful tools, mathematicians have had mixed opinions about using the technology to solve mathematical problems. Obviously this is particularly topical when we look at what AI can (and can't) do - but there are plenty of opportunities for the brute force of computing to deal with a tricky mathematical road block, and that's what Paul Nahin sets out to cover here. I'll say straight up front that I think this book would have been better and would have had a wider audience if it had not made excessive assumptions of what a reader knows. In his introductory chapter, Nahin says 'There is nothing in this book that attentive high school students who have taken an AP-calculus or AP-statistics class will find beyond them. This assumption lets me, for example write (as I do in the first chapter) the symbol X without explanation with the expectation that a reader will instantly recognise it as denoting the binomial coefficient...' (I have written X h...

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

Our attention was drawn to this book’s existence by a helpful nudge on Twitter following the review of Romeel Davé’s Simulating the Cosmos a few weeks ago. I gave that book four stars, as regards its appeal to a general audience, while saying that my own personal rating was a full five stars. That’s because computer simulation is, in a sense, my own specialist subject, and I thought Davé did a great job of explaining how cosmological simulations work, and what they can tell us about the universe. At the same time, I acknowledged that not everyone is going to be enough of a space or computer geek to care about such questions in the first place. Pontzen’s book deals with essentially the same subject, but approaches it from such a different angle that there’s very little overlap between the two. I’m giving this one four stars, too, but for pretty much the opposite reason. Personally, I found it frustratingly tangential to the subject it was ostensibly about, never really getting to grips...

In a wide-ranging book, Scott Shapiro uses five historical uses of computer worms, viruses and phishing to illustrate the processes involved in cybercrime at both the technological and human level. We start inevitably with the ARPANET worm of 1988, with its ironic creator (his Dad worked for the NSA), that crippled many Sun and VAX computers on the proto-internet, even though it wasn't intended to do harm. This was well-documented two years later in Clifford Stoll's book The Cuckoo's Egg , but where Stoll gives a dramatic description from the point of view of a system administrator who faced the worm, Shapiro steps back more, both to give a wider context and to give reasonably accessible details of the mechanisms used by the worm. (I say 'reasonably' because some of Shapiro's analogies obscured rather than clarified what the worm's four means of attack did.) We then move on to the early DOS viruses coming out of Bulgaria, the phone hack that released, amongs...

There is a lot in the news on misinformation and disinformation - Gary Smith explores the way three factors of this kind can tarnish the public's attitude to science. He suggests that there is rising distrust of science and scientists as a result of: disinformation (telling fibs), data torturing (where data is selectively used, for example choosing the time period that most emphasises the desired result) and data mining (where big data is misused by picking up on the inevitable random correlations that occur in large quantities of data without there being a causal reason for the correlation). Smith makes the important point that in a world where we are presented with interpretations of so much data, a clear understanding of these three factors is essential if we are to make any sense of what we hear and read. While disinformation is often a problem when non-scientists present 'their truth' that is often used to attack science, data torturing and data mining is often underta...

In some ways this is a less effective version of Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction with an overlay of identity politics.  Meredith Broussard usefully identifies the ways in which AI systems incorporate bias - sometimes directly in the systems, at other times in the unjustified ways that they are used. We see powerful examples, for example, of the hugely problematic crime prediction systems where it's entirely clear that these AI systems simply should not be used. A useful pointer is what a 'white collar' crime prediction system would do (and why it doesn't really exist). We get similar examples from education, ability issues, gender rights and medical applications. What I'd hoped would make the difference from earlier books were solutions, when Broussard brings in the concept of 'public interest technology' and outlines a 'potential reboot'. Again, there is some interesting material, though it can seem to be in conflict with other p...

There are very few individuals who have made such wide contributions to mathematical and scientific topics as did John von Neumann. In this splendid scientific biography, Ananyo Bhattacharya introduces to many for the first time both von Neumann's work and life. It's easy to get the balance between the life and the science wrong with this kind of biography - Bhattacharya keeps it just right, filling in all the biographical details we need, without falling into the trap of giving us endless boring detail of the von Neumann family's background. Similarly, with a couple of small exceptions I'll mention later, the description of his work is at a level that remains approachable with a bit of effort from the reader, yet we are given enough information to see just how important and novel von Neumann's contribution was. The significantly more famous Richard Feynman is probably the only twentieth century scientist I can think of with the breadth of interests and originality ...

Over the years I've come across a range of graphic novels and graphic popular science (that's 'graphic' in the sense of illustrated, not explicit) and rarely found one that wasn't a bit of a disappointment compared with a traditional book. I think this is because, despite the old adage about a picture being worth a thousand words, the reduction of text to speech bubbles and tiny captions means that it's difficult to get any subtlety into the fiction, or depth of understand of the science into non-fiction. The Phantom Scientist is a graphic novel, but one that according to the description 'draws together linguistics, biology, astrophysics, and robotics in a mind-bending puzzle that will thrill and inform readers' - so it takes on the very difficult role of both being an SF mystery thriller and something that puts across mathematical and scientific concepts. Because what happens is certainly not possible at the moment, it does stray into science fiction. ...