Hermes and the Golden Thinking Machine (MIT Press) - Softcover

"A wonderful send-up of deconstructionism, (hence a clever counterpoint to 'The Name of the Rose') and academe generally. I found it highly entertaining." Robert Berwick "A book that can be treated as both a detective story and a reflection of what some of our faculty of arts colleagues are up to is well worth consideration for one's next free long weekend." John A. Campbell, Nature "A charmingly academic novel about the nature of thought and the history of machine intelligence." Simson L. Garfinkel, Christian Science Monitor "Mr. Tzonis writes with the sort of brio one never encounters in textbooks." Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review "Tzonis' book is clearly a good detective novel full of tantalizing references to and synopses of many important ideas about intelligence, computers, mind, epistemology, reasoning, and the like. It is charmingly, even sparklingly, written." Douglas Hofstadter

Hermes and the Golden Thinking Machine is a witty, fast-paced mystery that combines suspense with crucial concepts from the emerging field of artificial intelligence. Harvard professor Hermes Steganos finds himself implicated in the theft of the "Golden Thinking Machine," a priceless ancient Greek computational device. Trapped in a pattern of events whose logic he cannot decipher, he must activate his new AI expert system to solve the mystery before it is too late.