Professor Hidetoshi Nishimori, Department of Physics, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Oh-okayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8551, Japan, Tel.: +81/3/57342488, Fax: +81/3/57342719, email: nishi@stat.phys.titech.ac.jp
Assuming only general knowledge of statistical mechanics and basic probability theory, Nishimori (physics, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan) reviews recent developments in error-correcting codes, image restoration, neural networks, and optimization problems. He provides a unified viewpoint traversing several different research fields with the replica methods as the common language, which emerged from the spin glass theory. The spin glass theory itself is addressed in the first part, followed by statistical-mechanical approaches to information processing problems. --SciTech Book News<br>