David Harel

David Harel
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Harel has a field day on this fact, bringing up numerous examples and showing just how useless a computer would be in such a situtation.

The examples are all interesting by themselves, but Harel brings so many up in detail and goes into the same points over and over again, the book can often really slow down.Thing is, he then goes on to show how some things are computable, but just very inefficient (either due to time or memory) and lists numerous examples which are also a little redundant, in my opinion.Again, all the examples are interesting by themselves and could make interesting reading for a textbook style book that doesn't require everything to be read, but in Computers Ltd. you find yourself saying "Yeah, yeah.I get the POINT!"

Luckily, the book is saved by two rather good chapters toward the end of the book.There is a good chapter that covers the new computing paradigms: parallel, quantum and molecular.Some are covered in more depth than others, but I do think that Harel didn't quite show some of the amazing advantages that they can have over the current serial computers.Sure, he points out that quantum computing can render current crytography obsolete, and that molecular and parallel computing can utilize cooperative computing to create efficient algorithms.There is still a lot more exciting information about those fields I felt he didn't divulge.