This list is curated from 33 mentions and sorted by most mentioned, then by date of most recent mention. The more a book is mentioned, the more likely it's recommended and a favorite... or they just like talking about it a lot!
Last updated: .
This list is curated from 33 mentions and sorted by most mentioned, then by date of most recent mention. The more a book is mentioned, the more likely it's recommended and a favorite... or they just like talking about it a lot!
Last updated: .
Game Changer
by Matthew Sadler, Natasha Regan
Huge congratulations @NatashaRegan123 @gmmds on winning the FIDE Chess book of the year!! It's been great fun collaborating with you on this, and seeing the wonderful influence that #AlphaZero and your brilliant Game Changer book has had on the game we all love. https://twitter.com/FIDE_chess/status/1280856803530719234
— Demis Hassabis
Culture (10 books)
by Iain Banks
Very formative for me and I read that while I was writing Theme Park and I still think it's the best this picture of a post-AGI future, an optimistic post-AGI future, where we're traveling the stars and dumanity sort of reached its full flourishing.
— Demis Hassabis
Foundation (7 books)
by Isaac Asimov
Some of the really formative things on me were Asimov's Foundation series, so interestingly, not the robotics books, I haven't really read any of his robot books, but the Foundation series was this really amazing series of sci-fi novels.
— Demis Hassabis
Permutation City
by Greg Egan
Yes agreed, diaspora is amazing, but I think it’s best to read permutation city first. Same with player of games and consider phlebas, although maybe it’s just cos that’s the order I read them in.
— Demis Hassabis
Consider Phlebas
by Iain M. Banks
Yes agreed, diaspora is amazing, but I think it’s best to read permutation city first. Same with player of games and consider phlebas, although maybe it’s just cos that’s the order I read them in.
— Demis Hassabis
Dreams of a Final Theory
by Steven Weinberg
I actually read this book, must have been a high school, called Dreams of a Final Theory by Stephen Weinberg.
— Demis Hassabis
Gödel, Escher, Bach
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
A really big scientific book for me was when I was writing Theme Park, obviously I was working on AI and building AI for the game, but I was also reading books like Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Hofstadter, which I suppose is more of a philosophy book, but it’s an incredible piece of work, tying together Gödel’s incompleteness theorem about mathematics, with Escher’s drawings and Bach’s fugues and showing that they’re all related in some way, this repeating cycle of patterns, this infinite patterns that they all exhibit, and then he tied it to consciousness, and intelligence, and it was just really inspiring for me and made me think about these deep questions, and I was discussing this with a lot of my friends. We were writing games together, and we were doing that 24/7 and we would discuss these things about what the limits of AI could be, if we could not just use it for what we were doing in games, but actually advance it to the level where it would become the same level as human, and they just felt like the sky was the limit.
— Demis Hassabis
Diaspora
by Greg Egan
Yes agreed, diaspora is amazing, but I think it’s best to read permutation city first. Same with player of games and consider phlebas, although maybe it’s just cos that’s the order I read them in.
— Demis Hassabis
The Player of Games
by Iain M. Banks
Yes agreed, diaspora is amazing, but I think it’s best to read permutation city first. Same with player of games and consider phlebas, although maybe it’s just cos that’s the order I read them in.
— Demis Hassabis
The Fabric of Reality
by David Deutsch
I think that poses all the big questions in physics that I would love one day to tackle with our AI tools.
— Demis Hassabis
Creativity, Inc.
by Ed Catmull
There's brilliant book called creativity Inc that was written about Pixar. I try to collect together all these different experiences and and figure out how to translate them into a scientific context.
— Demis Hassabis
Playing AlphaGo’s Early 3-3 Invasion
by Yuan Zhou
New Go book written about AlphaGo's early 3-3 move innovation that all the pros are playing now #AlphaGo https://twitter.com/theaga/status/1067100911955320835
— Demis Hassabis
Sapiens
by Yuval Noah Harari
I think that's a really great book, there's so many interesting things. There's not many times I read a book were I've come out with 20 new ideas I hadn't thought about before and that book made me think like that.
— Demis Hassabis
The Glass Bead Game
by Hermann Hesse
Really reminds me of one of my favourite books of all-time: "The Glass Bead Game" by the incomparable Hermann Hesse
— Demis Hassabis
