Wow.  This is a heavy read.  And lots to think about.  

I don't know why I thought Simon was from Britain.  I was halfway through Chapter 3 when I checked out the back cover and saw the man's credentials.  Pretty interesting.  He's a professor of Computer Science and Psychology with a Nobel Prize in Economics.  That's what I call a Renaissance Man.  

I have been most impressed with Chapter 3 so far.  The comparison of human activity with those of an ant trying to get back into the anthill gave me pause for reflection.  I'm not sure if I would completely agree with Simon on that one point, but it is an interesting point of view.  

Tomorrow (Monday), I'm going to be teaching a little lesson on encryption in my CalPoly Extension class – at the request of the students.  I think I'm going to use his DONALD+GERALD=ROBERT cryptarithmetic example to confound the class – both of them!  That was a really interesting little exercise in testing one's problem solving creativity.  

I find it also interesting in Chapter 4, where Simon is approaching Short Term Memory and Long Term Memory  challenges like he is designing a new chip!  There are obvious parallels in the architectures and I believe, perhaps wrongly, that we tend to design machines that act like we do, if they don't always look like we do.  So perhaps eventually we (humans) will design and build CPUs that behave more and more like the real human mind.  

I just hope we give them a nice personality;-)