Top Highlights

• For if we are capable of knowing what is where in the world, our brains must somehow be capable of representing this information—in all its profusion of color and form, beauty, motion, and detail.
• Each problem has to be addressed from several points of view—as a problem in representing information, as a computation capable of deriving that representation, and as a problem in the architecture of a computer capable of carrying out both things quickly and reliably.
• What does it mean, to see? The plain man’s answer (and Aristotle’s, too) would be, to know what is where by looking. In other words, vision is the process of discovering from images what is present in the world, and where it is.
• This duality—the representation and the processing of information—
• Once people did begin to speculate about such tasks and machines, however, it soon became clear that many aspects of the world around us could benefit from an information-processing point of view.