In this entertaining and challenging new collection of logic puzzles,
Raymond Smullyan—author of What Is the Name of This Book? And The
Lady or the Tiger?—continues to delight and astonish us with his
gift for making available, in the thoroughly pleasurable form of
puzzles, some of the most important mathematical thinking of our time.
In the first part of the book, he transports us once again to that
wonderful realm where knights, knaves, twin sisters, quadruplet
brothers, gods, demons, and mortals either always tell the truth or
always lie, and where truth-seekers are set a variety of fascinating
problems. The section culminates in an enchanting and profound
metapuzzle (a puzzle about a puzzle), in which Inspector Craig of
Scotland Yard gets involved in a search of the Fountain of Youth on
the Island of Knights and Knaves. In the second and larger section, we
accompany the Inspector on a summer-long adventure into the field of
combinatory logic (a branch of logic that plays an important role in
computer science and artificial intelligence). His adventure, which
includes enchanted forests, talking birds, bird sociologists, and a
classic quest, provides for us along the way the pleasure of solving
puzzles of increasing complexity until we reach the Master Forest
and—thanks to Gödel’s famous theorem—the final revelation.
To Mock a Mockingbird will delight all puzzle
lovers—the curious neophytes as well as the serious students of
logic, mathematics, or computer science.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780307819796
Publisert
2017
Utgiver
Random House Digital Inc.
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter