This is a book whose time has come-again. The first edition (published by McGraw-Hill in 1964) was written in 1962, and it celebrated a number of approaches to developing an automata theory that could provide insights into the processing of information in brainlike machines, making it accessible to readers with no more than a college...

The authors show that there are underlying mathematical reasons for why games and puzzles are challenging (and perhaps why they are so much fun). They also show that games and puzzles can serve as powerful models of computation―quite different from the usual models of automata and circuits―offering a new way of thinking about...