One one zero zero zero zero zero one zero zero ...

If you like listening to 50 digit binary notations read out as ones and zeros for a couple hours endlessly than this is an audiobook for you. On the other hand, the value of this book is apparent so I ordered th ed print version.

23 people found this helpful

Not for listening to

Seemingly endless reading of binary numbers that on the page would be typed out is absolutely unbearable and conveys no meaning what so ever. This is done not a few times and one 20 minute chapter is nearly exclusively this. Better to read the book.

20 people found this helpful

This is an eyeball read

Great book but not well suited for experiencing as an audiobook. Several sections were very equation/calculation/number heavy and I found it painful to listen to physics notation fully enunciated over and over ie. “open bracket vertical bar A close bracket right arrow...”

16 people found this helpful

Echoing others: get the book in paper.

Put shortly, please buy the book. It is important material heading into the 21st century. AI, philosophy, and consciousness studies from the lens of science is a huge portion of the future. Roger Penrose has done a phenomenal and thorough overview starting from scratch. He builds his ideas fluently and expertly, but reading it aloud simply did not work. I had read the reviews and tried my hardest to make it through the audio. It's not a poor performance, but what tossed me over the tolerant cliff was the reading of the syntax.

I can't help but wonder why a mathematician didn't read a mathematician's book.
f(x) should be read "f OF x" and NOT "f open parenthesis x close parenthesis" This became ridiculously tedious. : (.
I wonder if the first half of the book I managed to hear did not included a whole hour of just hearing syntax.

I crave the material, and have ordered the physical book because it will be important to SEE the binary in order to digest it, rather than hear it. I'd like to SEE the equations and intuitively follow along. I couldn't keep order of the sequences in my head and it lost it's meaning and just became a thorn to get over.

9 people found this helpful

Put you to sleep boring

I respect Roger Penrose but this attempt at a new book was a complete failure. While the subject is interesting the way in which he hoes about explaining things will put you to sleep. He explains every aspect of the math and actually writes it out number by number.

8 people found this helpful

Not an audio book. Completely useless.

Probably a great book but not in audio form unless you can follow equations just by listening. I can't. Nobody can!!! What were they thinking?! Can't even return it for some reason. Very disappointed.

4 people found this helpful

Great Book, Horrible Audiobook

Penrose is obviously brilliant and a lot of the information in this book is still relevant after 30 years. But seriously the narrator actually reads seamingly endless strings of binary numbers like '0010111010110001101010', and Turing Machine bit code like ' 10000R0100111101L left arrow 001101...stop'. It's really almost too much to sit thru. If you're getting this audiobook so you can listen along while reading the printed version - great, go for it. But if you're planning to listen in the car or while just chilling, you might want to give this one a pass.

2 people found this helpful

Don’t listen to this, read the book

It is nearly impossible to listen to this book it has lots of math equations that are read out expertly by the narrator but it’s just impossible to listen to. Read the book

1 person found this helpful

Good but Dated and Not Great on Audible

The first few chapters of this book would be very difficult in just audible unless you are already very familiar with Turing Machines and the Mandelbrot Set. Unfortunately there is no PDF to go along with the book. Some images can be seen on Google Books and, of course, in paper or kindle.

The rest of the book suggests that human intelligence is non-computable and AI will be unable to produce machines that feel and intuit. Some of these ideas have become dated some are interesting but I did not find any deeply compelling.

Nevertheless this book is has a lot of interesting information and ideas and was well worth the listen, but I would not strongly recommend the Audible version.

The narration was very good considering the very difficult material.

1 person found this helpful

Historical but Tedious

The book's value is that, after his torturously detailed coverage of 1980's tape-drive technology programming for mathematicians, you come away realizing that the mathematical algorithm approach to creating artificial intelligence may not be the way to go, that it needs to be more language-based so it can ask questions (though words may be defined spatially and by forces, which brings us back to numbers and algorithms, but with clearer guidance)...