Linguistic Geometry - From Search to Construction

Rating:
Summary: Powerful new methodology
Review: Linguistic Geometry: From Search to Construction is a remarkable book. It offers hope to solve large complex problems where conventional methods provide solutions that are computationally intractable. The problems in question cover a large area: from military strategies to robot control on the factory floor. As long as the problem may be represented as a kind of a game, where the game pieces move in a real or imaginary multi-dimensional board, using rules expressible via geometrical relations on the board, the Linguistic Geometry (LG) method would cover it. It is interesting to note that while the adversarial pieces are needed for the game model, the notion of the adversary may not be even defined for the original problem. Indeed, as demonstrated in the example of creating repair schedule for the power plants from the book, the adversary may be artificially introduced. Of course, for many problems, such as finding a winning strategy on a battlefield for Air, Ground, or Undersea operations, etc., the friendly and adversarial pieces, game boards and other gaming elements are usually already in place. Thus, the LG methodology would be clearly applicable. Entertainment games would be another such example. The method for finding the winning strategies described in the book is quite ingenious. It originally stems from the heuristics that the Chess grand masters employ to defeat their opponents. The book author, Boris Stilman, spent quite a few years with the longest reigning world Chess champion, Michael Botvinnik, distilling Botvinnik's ideas about how the grandmasters win or loose games, into an elegant mathematical theory which later became the Linguistic Geometry. The book has both theory and plenty of easy as well as medium difficulty examples. If you were interested in the kind of problems mentioned above, it would be worthwhile for you to read the book. For me, it was entertaining as well.