X-Message-Number: 1236 From: (Marvin Minsky) Newsgroups: sci.cryonics Subject: unpublished chapters of "The Turing Option" Message-ID: <> Date: 26 Sep 92 22:20:43 GMT I have archived two unpublished chapters of "The Turing Option" by Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky, published by Warner Books, August 1992. Use ftp wuarchive.wustl.edu (and then login with name "anonymous") cd doc/minsky get option.chapters These chapters have a lot of far-out ideas about how to build a humanlike machine. Harry Harrison and I have been longtime friends. One day he said that he liked my book 'The Society of Mind' and suggested that the ideas could reach a larger audience if I wrote a version in the form of a novel. When I said I didn't have the talent for that, he offered to collaborate. We decided that the central character Brian would be a mathematical super-hacker of the future who would build the first AI with a human-like mind. Harry drafted the action plot, and I suppled the technical stuff. While our hero is building his robot (in the year 2023) he is shot in the head by mysterious criminals who steal the prototype. This lets us explain computational aspects of the theory in the context of repairing Brian's brain, while also explaining psychological aspects in the context of reconstructing his childhood memories. A co-author does not have complete control. These FTP chapters are part of the text I wrote that did not make it into the published book. Both Harry and the editor at Warner thought they would slow down the story too much. At the time I disagreed, but now I think they were right. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=1236