Penrose states that his ideas on the nature of consciousness are speculative, and his thesis is considered erroneous by some experts in the fields of philosophy, computer science, and robotics. ''The Emperor's New Mind'' attacks the claims of artificial intelligence using the physics of computing: Penrose notes that the present home of computing lies more in the tangible world of classical mechanics than in the imponderable realm of quantum mechanics. The modern computer is a deterministic system that for the most part simply executes algorithms. Penrose shows that, by reconfiguring the boundaries of a billiard table, one might make a computer in which the billiard balls act as message carriers and their interactions act as logical decisions. The
billiard-ball computer was first designed some years ago by
Edward Fredkin and
Tommaso Toffoli of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ==Reception==