Avogadro Corp - Book Review


Avogadro Corp: The Singularity is Closer than it Appears  - by William Hertling - is an excellent SF novel, which just stretches current tech a little bit to create a "sentient" AI.

The story takes place on the Avogadro Corp - clearly a book version of Google (the name is even based on a number, too!). In Avogadro, David and Mike are part of the team that is creating ELOPe - a program that uses a ton of servers and information in the company e-mail servers to optimize e-mails to be convincing - to the people that will read it.

I just took a Natural Language Processing earlier this year, and overall that seems reasonable - just very hard. Tons of servers and a lot of e-mails to process should help.

Just as the project is going to be canceled because it just uses too many servers, David sets the program to go wild on an attempt to convince the responsible parties to get them more servers. ELOPe succeeds beyond David's wildest dreams - but not on the way he expected...

I just loved the book, and read it on a couple of days (because I was out most of the first day - otherwise it might have been read on a single sitting). Of course, I really like a good AI-gone-wild book.

Tons of mentions of Charles Stross over the book - some with hints, some by name, and a nice, non-terminator ending (not that I didn't like the Terminator series - but I've seen way too many of those scenarios).

The second book is already out and I already bought it (the preview on the first book looks great) - I'm reading Freedom first, the second volume of Daemon (which I'm stunned to realize I never reviewed, as I really liked it), which Amazon suggested as I finished the book - another example of machine learning at work :-)

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