When, in 1984?86, Richard P. Feynman gave his famous course on computation at the California Institute of Technology, he asked Tony Hey to adapt his lecture notes into a book. Although led by Feynman, the course also featured, as occasional guest speakers, some of the most brilliant men in science at that time, including Marvin Minsky, Charles Bennett, and John Hopfield. Although the lectures are now thirteen years old, most of the material is timeless and presents a ?Feynmanesque? overview of many standard and some not-so-standard topics in computer science such as reversible logic gates and quantum computers.
Author(s): Richard P. Feynman
Series: Frontiers in Physics
Edition: 1
Publisher: CRC Press
Year: 2000
Language: English
Pages: 324
Tags: Computer Science; Reversible Logic Gates; Quantum Computers
Cover
Frontispiece
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Editor's Foreword by Tony Hey
Preface by Richard Feynman
1. Introduction to Computers
1.1: The File Clerk Model
1.2: Instruction sets
1.3: Summary
2. Computer Organization
2.1: Gates and Combinational Logic
2.2: The Binary Decoder
2.3: More on Gates: Reversible Gates
2.4: Complete Sets of Operators
2.5: Flip-Flops and Computer Memory
2.6: Timing and Shift Registers
3. The Theory of Computation
3.1: Effective Procedures and Computability
3.2: Finite State Machines
3.3: The Limitations of Finite State Machines
3.4: Turing Machines
3.5: More on Turing Machines
3.6: Universal Turing Machines and the Halting Problem
3.7 Computability
4. Coding and Information Theory
4.1: Computing and Communication Theory
4.2: Error Detecting and Correcting Codes
4.3: Shannon's Theorem
4.4: The Geometry of Message Space
4.5: Data Compression and Information
4.6: Information Theory
4.7: Further Coding Techniques
4.8: Analogue Signal Transmission
5. Reversible Computation and the Thermodynamics of Computing
5.1: The Physics of Information
5.2: Reversible Computation and the Thermodynamics of Computing
5.3: Computation: Energy Cost versus Speed
5.4: The General Reversible Computer
5.5: The Billiard Ball Computer
5.6: Quantum Computation
6. Quantum Mechanical Computers
6.1: Introduction
6.2: Computation With a Reversible Machine
6.3: A Quantum Mechanical Computer
6.4: Imperfections and Irreversible Free Energy Loss
6.5: Simplifying the Implementation
6.6: Conclusions
6.7: References
7. Physical Aspects of Computation
A Caveat from the Editors
7.1: The Physics of Semiconductor Devices
7.2: Energy Use and Heat Loss in Computers
7.3: VLSI Circuit Construction
7.4: Further Limitations on Machine Design
Afterword: Memories of Richard Feynman
Suggested Reading
Index
