The Babbage Group: Exploring Physics and Computation
babbage@media.mit.edu

The Babbage group comprises students with a variety of backgrounds, all of which share an interest in answering one of the most fundamental philosophical and scientific questions of our time: what is computation, and how can we use this amazing property of our universe to its fullest extent? How can we create machines that share properties of intelligent systems, and what are the properties that are important to them? How can we use physics to help us understand and control the world?

Table of Contents
Archives - for group reference
Texts and Writings - coherent writings in general
Readings - selected readings for sessions
Babbage Session 1 - 5/27/98: introduction and categories
Babbage Session 2 - 6/3/98: basics of computer science
Babbage Session 3 - 6/10/98: Turing Machines, and Recursion Theory
Babbage Session 4 - 6/17/98: Information Theory, Entropy, Computation
Babbage Session 5 - 7/8/98: Charles Bennett (Logical Reversibility), Cris Moore (Iterative maps)
Babbage Session 6 - 7/1/98: Parametrization, Analog VLSI, and nonlinearity
Babbage Session 10 - 7/29/98: the Book, phase transitions in difficulty, NP-completeness

People
Edward Boyden - home page [MIT Media Lab]
Benjamin Vigoda - home page [MIT Media Lab]
Rich Devaul - home page [MIT Media Lab]
Yael Maguire - home page [MIT Media Lab]
Neil Gershenfeld - home page [MIT Media Lab]
Bernd Schoner - home page [MIT Media Lab]

20 Ames St · Cambridge, MA 02139 USA · 617.253.2383 · babbage@media.mit.edu