Given how little most of us understand about the insides of our computers, the etchings on the silicon chips at their cores can look as cryptic and occult as the tracery on a shaman's vision stone. Danny Hillis, an alumnus of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, founder of Thinking Machines, and now a researcher at Disney, wastes no time bemoaning this widespread ignorance about computers. Near the end of The Pattern on the Stone, in fact, he suggests that no one is smart enough to understand all the things computers can do. But Hillis nonetheless sets out to dispel the computer's undeserved mystique using a series of equally nimble comparisons.

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