“Whassamatter with you guys? 127 minutes to go and the offer for a FREE Kindle copy of [Book Title] closes! Tick tock…”

Reading between the characters (tweets are so short [...]]]>

 I came across a tweet today. It was from a complete stranger, about a book I’d never heard of. This is the full text:

“Whassamatter with you guys? 127 minutes to go and the offer for a FREE Kindle copy of [Book Title] closes! Tick tock…”

Reading between the characters (tweets are so short you don’t get the luxury of lines) here is an author trying to promote his book who thought it would be a good idea to give it away free for a period to get some interest going. It seems like a reasonable thing to do and yet, you can tell he isn’t having a lot of luck with it. The puzzlement is obvious; surely people will grab a copy of your book if it’s free? After all, it’s free! Free, as in, it doesn’t cost you a penny. There is also, I suspect, a hint of fear there too. If you can’t give your book away for free, what do you have to do to get people to read it?

The problem is that the premise is all wrong.  A book – any book – is never free, even if you don’t have to pay for it. It will still cost you hours of your time to read it. And your time is without doubt the most precious thing you own. It’s a finite resource, you have very little of it to spare, and there are a million other things you could be spending it on.

So let me make this post uncharacteristically short and jump straight to the take-home message. If you want people to read your book, you have to persuade them that it is worth their time to do so. Sell it to them. Get them to want it. Convince them that the hours they spend reading it will be much more fun and fulfilling than spending those same hours in any other way, and on any other book. Then you won’t need to give it away – or sell it for $0.99c. An experience that good is worth paying real money for.

Novels take a long time to write. Well, they take me a long time. Some people bang out several in a year. I’m happy if I can [...]]]>

I’m 24,000 words into my new novel and I can’t help thinking about the process I’m going through as I hammer this story out, word by word.

Novels take a long time to write. Well, they take me a long time. Some people bang out several in a year. I’m happy if I can write just one. The last novel I finished was a sci-fi comedy called Cargo Cult. From beginning to end, it took me more than ten years. Even when it just takes a year, it’s far too long to plot it in detail and then just write what you plotted. In a year of living with a group of characters in your head and a particular set of ideas you want to explore, you are going to find that things develop. Your initial plot can seem shallow and weak by the time that year is up, same with your initial characterisations, and your initial thoughts on your main themes. I’d go so far as to say that, if these things don’t develop, mature, improve, deepen, and evolve while you write the book, you’re just not thinking very hard about what you’re doing.

Day-to-day, of course, nothing much happens. The actual mechanics, the craft, of putting words on screens is absorbing and takes up most of my resources. The choosing of every word, the structuring of every clause and sentence, the building of every paragraph, section, and chapter, are all such massive tasks with so many possible alternatives, that it is a miracle a mere human brain can do the job at all. Probably it can’t. Sometimes I find myself ‘satisficing’ (as the brilliant Herbert Simon once put it) when I’d rather be optimising, but I’m limited by what my brain can do. I suspect the mark of genius in writing is the degree to which optimisation is possible for an individual writer.

The majority of thinking about the story, its characters and ideas, for me at least, goes on outside the periods of actual writing. I just don’t have the capacity to do both well at the same time. Sometimes the need to understand some element of the story is a prerequisite to proceeding. I become lost in a miasma of ignorance and stupidity as I grapple with some important idea without which the story cannot proceed. Sometimes this is a technical issue – how long the tether needs to be for a Lunar space elevator, for example, or how the Polish secret service processes interviewees – and these are the easy ones. They can usually be solved with a half-hour of research (and some maths revision). Much harder are questions of how a character should develop – what’s realistic, what’s likely, and what’s best going to serve the story? Or  what the future will be like. I spent several days doing nothing but charting likely developments in science, politics, economics, society, healthcare, various technologies, etc., and their tangled interactions, over the next fifty years, before I could write my novel TimeSplash. And then did it all again, pushing it out an extra thirty years for The Credulity Nexus.

The hardest problems of all are the ones to do with concepts. For my novel Time and Tyde, I spent scores of hours reading books and papers on the physics of time travel (none of which appeared in the book, but I needed to get it straight in my mind before I could be confident I wasn’t going to write something stupid). For Emissaries, the first book of my first “Omega Point” space opera, I agonised over the physics of space-warping in a similar way. Again, little of it got into the text, but I have to know that what is there is completely consistent with the science. Yet the hardest concepts of all are the ordinary human ones – love, jealousy, fear, dependence, and so on. For a recent short story which is to appear in an anthology called Hope, I decided I needed to understand exactly what hope is before I could start. Have you ever wondered? It took me a whole month to get my feeble brain around that one. A month in which I did nothing constructive at all and drove my wife crazy as I tried out new “insights” on her day after day. It’s a kind of writer’s block, I suppose, but one that always, always leads to a better story in the end.

Right now, I’m grappling with an old friend: the antipathy between empathy and psychopathy and how far a character whose nature is dominated by one can be led by circumstances towards the other. This conundrum and I went twelve rounds during the writing of my last-but-one novel, Mindrider, in which my protagonist was a rather unpleasant, alien brain parasite. I think I won on points, so I suppose it’s hardly surprising it is demanding a re-match in my new work in progress, The Sentience Machine.

Writing a novel is such a long way from catching words as they float by and pinning them to the page. It is a massive decision-making process on multiple levels, coupled with a huge effort to understand at least some aspects of the people we are and the universe we inhabit, together with the presentation of all this work in a form that will stimulate and entertain. It is by far the most difficult, most satisfying, and most enjoyable work I have ever done.

Belief comes first, rationalizations follow behind. That is the basic theme of this new book on belief by professional sceptic, Michael Shermer. Belief comes first because we’re wired that way, Dr. Shermer says. We see patterns in everything (sometimes even when they aren’t [...]]]>

(This review first appeared in the New York Review of Books.)

Belief comes first, rationalizations follow behind. That is the basic theme of this new book on belief by professional sceptic, Michael Shermer. Belief comes first because we’re wired that way, Dr. Shermer says. We see patterns in everything (sometimes even when they aren’t there) and we are disposed to see an active agent behind every pattern (even the false ones, and even when there is no one there.) According to Dr. Shermer, finding patterns in the world and ascribing agency to their creation is the foundation for beliefs of all kinds, from political opinions, through conspiracy theories, to alien abductions, gods and demons.

As evidence that we are avid pattern-finders, Dr. Shermer presents psychological results going back to the operant conditioning of “superstitious” behaviour in animals by B.F. Skinner and the other Behaviourists, the work of ethologists like Konrad Lorenz on “imprinting”, and from other areas such as face recognition, and pattern finding under uncertainty. It is a solid and well-established case, backed up by more recent work by Susan Blackmore on how people who are believers in the supernatural are more likely to see patterns in noisy images than non-believers. He also believes there are good evolutionary reasons for us being this way.

For our tendency to ascribe agency, he cites the work of psychologist Bruce Hood, looks at out of body experiences, tells of his own experiences with Michael Persinger’s “God Helmet” (which induces neuron firing in the temporal lobes using strong magnetic fields, during which some subjects have reported intense religious experiences.) He also discusses magicians and skilled illusionists and the work of Randi and others in debunking them. Here Dr. Shermer’s case is weaker, relying heavily on personal anecdotes rather than on scientific studies.

To convince us that belief always precedes reasoned argument, Dr. Shermer takes us on an extended tour of beliefs of various kinds – political, religious, conspiracy theories, alien abductions, and so on. If you’ve read other books by Dr. Shermer – particularly Why People Believe Weird Things and The Mind of the Market – you’ll already be familiar with most of the material here.

While fascinating in places and challenging in others, it is, in the end, disappointing. The mass of anecdote, sprinkled with odd bits of science, is not convincing and often seems to ramble away from the central argument. There is a curious section in which Dr. Shermer attempts to mount a scientific defence of free market economics, which will no doubt be as irritating to a liberal reader as it is unconvincing to a scientist. In fact, it illustrates Dr. Shermer’s theme perfectly – albeit unintentionally – by showing how scientific findings can be cherry-picked to build arguments around a belief that is already entrenched in the author’s mind.

Having presented the case that we form beliefs on the basis of unconscious, often irrational processes, and that all our argumentation in support of these beliefs is then added post hoc and subject to a wide range of cognitive biases which he lists and explains, Dr. Shermer leaves us in a near-hopeless state. The human condition, according to this perspective, is one of deep-rooted, biased subjectivity and perpetual, unresolvable conflict between believers with different sets of beliefs.

To save us from this conclusion, he attempts, at the end of the book, to present the scientific method as a way out of the morass. By basing judgements of truth on what is repeatedly observable by anyone making those observations in the same circumstances, and by insisting that explanations of observations are themselves to be subject to tests whose outcomes must also be observable by anyone who performs them in the same way, science might cut through the fog of individual bias, superstition and prejudice, to yield something like a true understanding of the world. “The God question” he says, is only immune to scientific examination as long as you only make claims about gods that can not, even in principle, be examined with the scientific method. Since many claims about gods can quite easily be examined scientifically – like the healing power of prayer – even this area of belief is not wholly immune.

Yet the value he places on objectivity rather than subjectivity, of external rather than internal reality, simply reveal more of his own personal beliefs. Yes, science could cut the Gordian knot of superstition, but only for those whose beliefs match Dr. Shermer’s. By his own logic, for those who believe that objective reality is unimportant or even non-existent, arguments which stem from other sets of beliefs will be never be persuasive. In fact, the more convincing we find Dr. Shermer’s thesis, the less likely it seems that scientific and superstitious world-views could ever be resolved.

It would be easy to say that you should read this book and make up your own mind, but, if Dr. Shermer is right, you have already made up your mind and this book will either reinforce your beliefs or spur you to challenge the author’s. Nevertheless, this reviewer’s belief is that a good dose of scepticism is always healthy, having your beliefs challenged is always good for you, and these things are exactly what you can count on from this book.

Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

Roger Penrose is one of the world’s leading mathematicians and a man who has also made significant contributions to theoretical physics. His work with Stephen Hawking on black holes is almost as famous [...]]]>

Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

Roger Penrose is one of the world’s leading mathematicians and a man who has also made significant contributions to theoretical physics. His work with Stephen Hawking on black holes is almost as famous as his purely mathematical contributions in the field of tiling, yet his contributions to science go well beyond these highlights. So, when he writes a book subtitled “An Extraordinary New View of the Universe” it should be of interest to anyone who is interested in the world, how it works, and how it got here.

And he really does present a quite extraordinary hypothesis. The universe, he says, is cycling repeatedly from one big bang to another. It bursts into existence in a very special state of uniformity and extremely low entropy, expands in ways consistent with the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which means entropy is constantly increasing – mostly through the production of black holes), and this expansion accelerates to infinity, over a period of at least 10^100 years, as the black holes evaporate away and even the rest mass of electrons and positrons fades to nothing. And then, by a geometrical sleight of hand, the new, uniform, low-entropy, ‘spacelike surface’ of the end of the old universe becomes the uniform, low-entropy, ‘spacelike surface’ of the big bang for a new universe.

To get from big bang to big bang, Prof. Penrose takes us on a journey that starts with the peculiar imperative of increasing entropy and the Second Law, passes through the special nature of the big bang. And ends with what he calls “conformal cyclic cosmology” (“conformal” because, he conjectures, sometime in the future, all particles are effectively massless and their “world lines” are therefore constrained to the outer surface of a “null cone” in a Minkovskian 4-space.) And if you’re having trouble following this, then Cycles of Time might not be the book for you.

Usually, popular science books, written for the layman, introduce us to established science, or summarise a new field. They avoid maths as much as possible, and they take their time over the more difficult ideas, often repeating the same material in slightly different ways, to help the non-specialist fumble their way through the arguments.

Cycles of Time is not that kind of book. It describes the author’s own ground-breaking and controversial research in cosmology. It is a difficult read and tackles extremely deep and complicated matters. Repetition is almost completely avoided, replaced with references back to where the material was first introduced or discussed. Although the reader is spared the worst of the mathematics (which is, nevertheless, presented in a set of appendices) there is enough maths in the text to make most non-specialists work hard to follow it, and the physical concepts presented are not for the faint-hearted.

Yet it is worth the work. Prof. Penrose is a clear and articulate writer. Even his academic papers are a marvel of lucidity. If these ideas seem hard, it is probably because they are, and even one of the world’s best science writers cannot make them any simpler than this. There are many references in Cycles of Time to Prof. Penrose’s earlier, 1,000-page work, The Road to Reality, and it is probably fair to say that this earlier book should be kept handy as a companion work when reading Cycles of Time. And degrees in maths and physics would probably help too.

Why is it worth the work? Well, there are great insights to be had here into the nature of entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and their relationship to the big bang and to black holes. Even though Prof. Penrose makes some assumptions which, even to a layman, seem suspect (for example, that the mass of the electron and positron will fade away given enough time, and that information loss in black holes can be re-stated as a loss of degrees of freedom as the singularity consumes particles) he also makes predictions, at least one of which (concentric anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) due to gravity waves from pre-big bang black hole interactions) has been tested and found to exist in the data.

Many physicists argue that these circles in the CMB are statistical artefacts, or that they are the result of colliding universes in a very different kind of multiverse. Yet the fact remains that they support Prof. Penrose’s “extraordinary view”. And, in the end, the data is what really matters in science. Probably the best thing to do is to take a deep breath, grab a copy of this fascinating book, and plunge right in.

Tweets: the number of tweets we have made since we started tweeting. I quite often look at that number when I’m considering whether to follow someone. If it is very high, I give [...]]]>

Our Twitter profiles provide a number of curious facts about us. In particular they give the following four figures:

Tweets: the number of tweets we have made since we started tweeting. I quite often look at that number when I’m considering whether to follow someone. If it is very high, I give them a miss. The last thing I need in my crowded tweet-stream is another 50 tweets per day!

Following: the number of tweeps we are following. I try to keep mine small by refusing to follow people whose tweets look dull, or who are marketing gurus (I make a few, rare exceptions), who are bots, or who are obviously just selling stuff. For all my vigilance, the number keeps growing.

Followers: this is the number of tweeps who follow you. You may think it odd, but I am constantly culling this number too – mostly using Twitter’s “block and report for spam” option. Spam on Twitter is a cursed plague. I block and report about twice the number of tweeps who are genuine. I think some of the people banging on about marketing insights and their no-doubt-brilliant self-published fantasy trilogy don’t even realise they have crossed the line and become spammers.

Listed: this is the number of tweeps who have added you to one of their lists (or the number of lists tweeps have added you to, which could be slightly different, but not significantly for our purposes.) I don’t do lists myself, but they do seem enormously popular as a way of organising one’s acquaintances.

It struck me how useful the ratios of some of these numbers might be. For example, marketing types are very keen not to “waste their time” following people who do not follow them back. There are even tools to help you see who these people are! Consequently, the savvy Web 2.0 tweep, will always have a Following that is almost exactly the same as their number of Followers – a ratio that is close to 1. When I see this, it makes me wary and, I have to say, reluctant to follow this particular ‘guru’. I don’t use my follows as a currency. I follow because the tweep looks interesting and is someone I wouldn’t mind chatting to. A tweep who sees a follow as a unit of exchange, seems to have missed the whole point of why most of us are there.

So here are three, key Twitter ratios and what I think they mean (with a couple of examples). Of course, I may be wrong about how to interpret these numbers, so I’m keen to hear your own interpretations. You might like to calculate your own ratios to see what kind of a tweep you are. To calculate them, take the first number and divide it by the second. It’s as easy as that. For example, if you are following five hundred people (Following = 500) and are followed by 250 people (Followers = 250) your Following to Followers ratio is exactly 2.

Following to Followers (F to F)

The closer this ratio is to 1, the more likely the tweep is to be a marketing guru.

The greater this ratio is than 1, the more likely the tweep is not trying to sell you anything.

The less this ratio is than 1, the more famous, beautiful, or fascinating the tweep is. (Famous because famous tweeps just have hundreds of thousands, or millions of followers and simply can’t follow that many themselves. Beautiful because I have observed that attractive young women always have far more followers than ordinary mortals – that’s why spammers always use avatars featuring this type. Fascinating because, well, I suppose there must be people out there who, even though they are not famous or beautiful, are still amazingly interesting – @shitmydadsays, for example.)

Listed to Followers (L to F)

The closer this ratio is to 1, the more these tweeps’ followers value what they say – because they have taken the trouble to put them into categories that are accessible to others. After a quick survey of about four random famous people, I can say that the Listed to Followers ratio does not seem to correlate with fame. Perhaps famous people are actually boring in real life?

Tweets to Followers (T to F)

If this ratio is significantly over 1, the tweep is probably a bore – either because they rant on about their own fascinating self so much, or because they are always chatting to their five hundred closest friends in long exchanges that have tweets in them like, “Lol. Me too!” or “I haz beans. You?” etc..

If this ratio is close to and preferably just below 1, then the tweep is probably actively engaged with their followers, but not excessively so.

If this ratio is significantly below 1, the tweep is likely to be in the famous/beautiful/fascinating category.

The following table compares Stephen Fry (famous, fascinating, but not beautiful) and Katy Perry (famous and beautiful, but not fascinating) to myself (neither famous, beautiful, nor fascinating).

Clearly, Stephen and Katy have the profiles of famous people on the F to F ratio, whereas I come out looking like a marketing guru! Perhaps only the truly famous and beautiful can get away with not following anyone at all hardly, and only tweeting occasionally. In fact, F to F and T to F ratios of 0.000 might become the new status symbol for the mega-famous. Certainly my own T to F ratio of over 4 is extremely undesirable. Am I really such a bore? Interestingly, my L to F ratio is ten times that of either Stephen or Katy, and I will take comfort in all the love that implies.

—-

*The number was so small that three decimal places just weren’t enough!

My view on free advice in general is that tends to be worth exactly what you paid [...]]]>

Emma Newman, rising star of the YA science fiction world, has just posted a thoughtful piece on her blog about why she doesn’t like giving writing advice. As with many of Emma’s musings, it got me thinking.

My view on free advice in general is that tends to be worth exactly what you paid for it. Mind you, I speak as somebody who worked as a consultant for many years, so I’m used to charging people through the nose for even the most banal truisms.

I’ve scoured the Web for advice on writing, and talked to my social network til I’m blue in the fingertips, but I haven’t found anything much that was useful in all those millions of words. It seems to me there are areas of this business where advice is worth having and there are areas where it is not (that’ll be $500, please.) Advice about the business side of publishing is something that most beginning writers need. Until I got some myself, I was just wasting my time and energy, with no hope ever of being published.

Advice about how to write is another matter altogether. My own view is that part of what you bring to the table as a writer is a sensitivity to what good writing sounds like. Some of this sensitivity you develop by reading lots of the very best books. The rest is just there in you. Some have it and some don’t. It’s like having an ‘ear’ for music. You can train yourself to some extent but in the end you are limited by your innate sensitivity to the nuances of the composition. And the worst of it is, if you don’t have it, you may never realise it.

It isn’t as simple as learning the ‘craft’ – understanding plot, sentence structure, punctuation, and so on. Those things are essential but that’s like saying understanding music theory is essential to writing a brilliant symphony. I know lots about music but I will never write a great symphony because I just don’t have the talent for it.

I’ve always been awed by something Stephen King wrote. It is in an essay called, “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully: in Ten Minutes“. He tells the tale of being a cub reporter on a small town weekly. He had turned in his first piece and the editor made a few deletions and adjustments. which he shows us in the essay. Standing there reading through what the editor had done, he says, “[The editor] looked up and must have seen something on my face. I think he must have thought it was horror, but it was not: it was revelation.” The young King, seeing those editorial changes, immediately grasped what it takes most of us half a lifetime to understand about the sound of a good piece of writing. And, he tells us, he never made those mistakes again.

I think this is why writing advice doesn’t help much; good writing depends on your own aesthetic sensibilities more than on anything else. Because of this, about the only thing I’ve found that does help is an honest critique, and the only people I’ve found who give you those are editors. A rejection is an honest critique (and helpful, in a limited way) but acceptance is where it really starts getting interesting, because then you have someone with a good ‘ear’ for writing, working to help you improve what you’ve written. Even then, like King, you need to be able to ‘hear’ what your editor is asking for.

Until you get to the point of working with a good critic, however, you are almost on your own. But not quite. You have two invaluable sources of criticism to tap into that can really make a difference. One is the critique group – of which there are many and of varying quality, online and off. If you’re not being accepted by publishers and working with editors, join a crit group. Do it now. The other is your own brutal honesty, which you really do need to cultivate. You have to listen to your own sense of what sounds good and what doesn’t. You have to refuse to accept anything you write that is merely acceptable because good enough is not good enough. If you let it go by, the editor won’t, and you’ll be rejected or (sometimes worse) you’ll have to suffer the horrible embarrassment of having a passage corrected that you already knew in your heart of hearts wasn’t the best you could do.

The idea behind In Situ is a good one. It is an anthology of science fiction tales about alien excavations, weird archaeology, and the unearthing of mysteries. As an avid [...]]]>

In preparation for their forthcoming sci-fi anthology, In Situ, Dagan Books has begun posting interviews with the contributing authors. And today, it’s my turn.

The idea behind In Situ is a good one. It is an anthology of science fiction tales about alien excavations, weird archaeology, and the unearthing of mysteries. As an avid Time Team viewer, I absolutely could not resist! And I can’t wait to see what the other writers have done with this ‘future archaeology’ theme. My own contribution is called “Salvage” and breaks new ground for me – a sci-fi story set so far into the future that everything we are now has been lost and forgotten. A very long way from the near future thrillers I have been writing lately.

Publication is planned for May 15, 2011, so grab an RSS feed and I’ll let you know when it’s out.

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books)

Over the past few days, a computer called Watson, built and programmed by IBM researchers, has played the game of Jeopardy! against two of the contest’s best players. And it won.

To many who watched the match [...]]]>

What next for Big Blue?

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books)

Over the past few days, a computer called Watson, built and programmed by IBM researchers, has played the game of Jeopardy! against two of the contest’s best players. And it won.

To many who watched the match on TV, this may seem like a simple piece of entertainment, or another “so what?” moment in the history of computing. Yet it is an achievement that many computer scientists will see as even more significant than when another IBM machine, Deep Blue, beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997.

In Final Jeopardy, Baker presents the story of the creation of this remarkable machine. After the widely trumpeted success of the Kasparov defeat, IBM was looking for another publicity coup of a similar kind. The idea for fielding a computerszed contestant on Jeopardy! came up in late 2004 but it wasn’t until 2007 and some tentative internal studies, that IBM executives agreed this was the challenge they wanted and set a team on a three-year path to achieving it. It is also when they began their initial approaches to Sony, which owns the Jeopardy! franchise.

Baker follows the relationship between the two companies as it developed over those years. Each came at the project with different hopes and expectations and the negotiations were sometimes a little fraught. Throughout, Sony had the upper hand. Without the Jeopardy! TV show, IBM had nothing. So when, for example, quite late in the day, Sony insisted that Watson needed a hand so that it could press an actual button like all the  other contestants, IBM had little choice but to build its computer a hand. Yet Baker makes it clear that both parties were keen to see the match succeed. His background on IBM, Sony, the Jeopardy! show and its creators are some of the more interesting parts of the book and are slotted into the unfolding story of Watson’s laborious preparation and endless testing in a way that keeps the book light and readable.

Readers interested in the technology will be disappointed that there is almost no reference to the actual hardware or software Watson employs. There are hints here and there. The language processing algorithms are described as “statistical” (suggesting several possibilities) and, when Mr. Baker describes the training of the betting strategy module, he could be describing the training of a genetic algorithm or even a neural network. But we are never taken to the level of naming even the class of solutions employed. This is a book for the technologically incurious. It is about the process of achievement and the struggle against failure. It is not about the technology of a question-answering machine. In fact, the notes refer us to a Scientific American article if we want to know how Watson works.

It is clear that Mr. Baker has a good grasp of the technology himself, and of the challenges inherent in answering general knowledge questions in natural language. So it is a shame that he frequently seems to use a kind of journalistic, dumbed-down vocabulary. Jeopardy! contestants are referred to as “know-it-alls” while Watson is repeatedly called “bionic” (which it is not). Yet Baker excels when it comes to showing how a Jeopardy! clue looks from Watson’s perspective, how the machine analyzes and answers it, and how little knowledge of anything Watson brings to bear. (Watson’s entire knowledge base is hand-crafted by its programmers.)

The story is about the people who built Watson and set up the Jeopardy! showdown. Yet, even at this level, the book is quite superficial. The unfolding story of how a team built a complex piece of software, with severe time restraints, and extremely ambitious goals, is all there, from inception to final victory. Yet the human story that the book could have told is absent. We hear almost nothing about the personal struggles of the main characters. Despite IBM’s team having been under pressure for three years to make Watson a winner, there is very little about the personal relationships of its members. Even when it comes to David Ferrucci, the IBM manager who ran the team and is the closest we have to a main character, we see only the surface. And even then, the brooding, somewhat bad-tempered, and driven man we might infer from the book, is at odds with the “open, articulate, and intelligent” person described in the Acknowledgments.

One thing that Mr. Baker does well in the book is to set the techniques and technology of Watson in the wider context of modern artificial intelligence (AI) research. As usual, he steers clear of the technicalities (as well as the philosophical and theological issues) but he gives the reader a whole chapter of background on the broad directions AI is taking. It is a necessarily incomplete and sketchy review but does a decent job of positioning Watson among its software peers. Now that the Jeopardy! game has been played and won, this background will help readers understand some of the rather dismissive remarks already appearing in the press from leading AI researchers.

Arguments about AI aside, it is an interesting question as to how intelligent a machine can appear if you just make it fast enough at crunching data. If a computer can be an unbeatable chess player, or a top-class Jeopardy! contestant, perhaps blinding speed and some clever algorithms are all we really need. Whatever the practical or theoretical issues, IBM seems to have been staking out this territory for itself. Not only do projects like Watson showcase the company’s super-fast hardware and its truckloads of researchers, they say to the world that, in our present state of understanding, brute force solutions can achieve what no amount of AI research has yet been able to.