 IT ALWAYS WORRIES ME when the cover of a book bears
a legend such as 'Critical acclaim for John Casti's previous book', followed by glowing extracts from said 'acclaim'. Personally I'd rather read critical acclaim for the book I'm about to buy, so are they
trying to hide something? The clear implication is that this book is going to be every bit as good as the last one, and that all the comments we see here will no doubt apply equally to both. I'm not convinced.
Casti's book is a nominally a tour of computer simulation, focusing on 'the science of surprise' (complexity and emergence), but it's really little more than a shallow
survey of other people's work cemented together with some dry philosophising about models and simulations. It's a reasonable idea, but at a little over 200 pages it's clear that there isn't enough meat
here to warrant a whole book. It's a highly episodic read, which gives the impression that it's been compiled from shorter works; most annoyingly, though, the sort of fleshing-out that would have made it
truly interesting is entirely absent and we are repeatedly directed to the references after only the briefest introduction to a piece of research. The book reads very like A K Dewdney's 'Computer Recreations'
anthologies but with far less substance and a somewhat narrower theme. As an account of the field it purports to cover it offers little that hasn't been done much better in books such as Steven Levy's Artificial Life
, James Gleick's Chaos and Roger Lewin's Complexity, to name an arbitrary few. To borrow a phrase from the anonymous New Scientist correspondent quoted on the cover, I'd suggest that
Would-be Worlds is little more than a tour d'horizon. |
