SMARTS tells the stories of the brilliant scientists who are redefining what intelligence is, and who, or what, displays it. Merging Darwin's ideas with Alan Turing's, they have found intelligence everywhere, while turning it into a process to be used. SMARTS' characters include the mysterious Turing, the infamous eugenicist Francis Galton, ethologist Frans B.M. de Waal and his political chimpanzees, Anne E. Russon and her miming orangutans; Dario Floreano and his altruistic robots, Stefano Mancuso and his masterful plants, engineer/philosopher Chris Eliasmith whose Spaun is as smart as the average university student and will be coming soon to a robot near you. There are slime molds that compute, octopuses that signal in colors they cannot see, spies, deaths, and disappearances. Part history, part memoir, SMARTS is a report from the front where machines are getting way too smart, and smart life is being machined.

Includes extensive end notes, bibliography and index.