Alan Turing: The Enigma

Description

Alan Turing (1912 - 1954) was a British mathematician who made history: His breaking of the German U-boat Enigma cipher in World War II ensured Allied-American control of the Atlantic. But Turing's vision went far beyond the desperate wartime struggle. Already in the 1930s he had defined the concept of the universal machine, which underpins the computer revolution. In 1945 he was a pioneer of electronic computer design. But Turing's true goal was the scientific understanding of the mind, brought out in the drama and wit of the famous "Turing test" for machine intelligence, and his prophecy for the twenty-first century.

Drawn into the cockpit of world events and the forefront of technological innovation, Alan Turing was also an innocent and unpretentious gay man trying to live in a society that criminalized him. In 1952, he revealed his homosexuality and was forced to participate in a humiliating treatment program, and was ever after regarded as a security risk. His suicide in 1954 remains one of the many enigmas in an astonishing life story. "As vivid a picture as one could hope for a most complex and intriguing man," says Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gdel, Escher, Bach. Both a compelling narrative and a work of scholarship, Alan Turing: The Enigma is the definitive biography of one of the greatest minds of the modern world.

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Alan Turing died in 1954, but the themes of his life epitomize the turn of the millennium. A pure mathematician from a tradition that prided itself on its impracticality, Turing laid the foundations for modern computer science, writes Andrew Hodges:

Alan had proved that there was no "miraculous machine" that could solve all mathematical problems, but in the process he had discovered something almost equally miraculous, the idea of a universal machine that could take over the work of any machine.

During World War II, Turing was the intellectual star of Bletchley Park, the secret British cryptography unit. His work cracking the German's Enigma machine code was, in many ways, the first triumph of computer science. And Turing died because his identity as a homosexual was incompatible with cold-war ideas of security, implemented with machines and remorseless logic: "It was his own invention, and it killed the goose that laid the golden eggs."

Andrew Hodges's remarkable insight weaves Turing's mathematical and computer work with his personal life to produce one of the best biographies of our time, and the basis of the Derek Jacobi movie Breaking the Code. Hodges has the mathematical knowledge to explain the intellectual significance of Turing's work, while never losing sight of the human and social picture:

In this sense his life belied his work, for it could not be contained by the discrete state machine. At every stage his life raised questions about the connection (or lack of it) between the mind and the body, thought and action, intelligence and operations, science and society, the individual and history.

And Hodges admits what all biographers know, but few admit, about their subjects: "his inner code remains unbroken." Alan Turing is still an enigma. --Mary Ellen Curtin

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Customer Reviews

The Enigma
The book smelled musty as if it had been in a damp basement for years.

2010-02-23 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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Wonderful Histories
Two books for the price of one.
The first is an excellent biography of Alan Turing and his contributions to number theory, computer science, cryptography, and World War II. He was an amazing man, although it's hard to escape the conclusion that his post-war years were nothing but a footnote to Bletchley.
The second is a frank history of homosexuality in the U.K. in the years immediately before and after the war. It's amazing how far we've come.
If there's a criticism of this book, it's that the author never really seems to connect the two themes. The only thing they have in common is Alan Turing; his homosexuality had no apparent influence on his mathematics, and his mathematics had no obvious impact on his sexuality. The whole gay side of Turing's life probably could have been left out of this work with little appreciable impact.
That minor exception aside, this is a beautiful work. I particularly appreciate Hodges's treatment of Turing's suicide; he doesn't blame it on the estrogen treatments, on British intelligence, on GCHQ security, or on the Freemasons. Turing simply killed himself for no apparent reason. (Why Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote the introduction to the book, blamed Turing's death on "a chemistry accident" is a mystery.)
Hodges is an elegant writer who should have taken up literature instead of mathematics.

2009-07-10 (Fairfax, Virginia United States) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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Excruciatingly Detailed
This biography on Alan Turing would have been so much better if the author had just thrown out about half the excruciatingly detailed descriptions of every single thing that happened in young Turing's life.

The first 100 pages and he's not even out of college yet. Boring and a little bit pointless. I'd like to recommend the book, but I'm only about half-way through and find myself skipping entire pages - I mean, who really wants to read all those letters he wrote to home when he was at boarding school? It's a little like reading the shopping list of a famous person - no matter how interesting that person may have been, it's just not that interesting to read about the mundane details of his or her life.

For a really great biography on another enigmatic scientist, try "Tesla - Man Out of Time" by Margaret Cheney. Now, that's the way to write a biography.

2009-05-27 | scholarly bureaucrat (Sacramento, CA) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 2

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interesting portrait of a compelling misfit
The book is well titled as the real Alan Turing was an enigma to many of those who knew him and perhaps even to himself. It is another example of how genius moves to its own rhythms and manages to get noticed in spite of itself.
Turing is, more than anyone else, the father of the modern computer, a man who could visualize something which did not even exist. It was his vision that eventually came to be the most powerful innovation in the last half century. Hodges book explores Turing's entire life and illuminates the context in which apparently arcane and irregular thinking came to have profound ramifications at the right moment and time.

2004-07-09 (York, PA USA) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 4

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A scientifically useful biography
I read part of this book in 1985 while trying to understand chaotic orbits. The problem was to understand how an orbit can be deterministic and apparently random. When I read Hodges' description of the Turing machine then I realized that it is easy to answer the question, and was able to write down the answer: one simply digitizes the map or ode, initial condition, and all the control parameters in some base of arithmetic, and then studies the action of a (digitized) positive Liapunov exponent on a digit string. I can't comment on the rest of the book, but Hodges does a very good job of presenting Turing's ideas of computable numbers and computable functions. When my collaborator Palmore read the description I refer to here, he said that he nearly fell out of his chair. We solved the problem of computability of chaotic orbits in that era together.

Is there a good book on computability and automata? So far, all the automata texts that I'm aware of are written in a special holy language of abstract computerize. The language erects an unnecessary barrier to understanding the basic ideas. Is Turing's original paper a proof, or an explanation of what he'd understood? I don't know, but I can refer the reader to "Descartes' Dream" by Reuben and Hersch for perespective.

2004-02-04 | Joseph L. McCauley (Austria+Texas) | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 4

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The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine

Product Details

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• ISBN13: 9780470229057

Description

Programming Legend Charles Petzold unlocks the secrets of the extraordinary and prescient 1936 paper by Alan M. Turing

Mathematician Alan Turing invented an imaginary computer known as the Turing Machine; in an age before computers, he explored the concept of what it meant to be computable, creating the field of computability theory in the process, a foundation of present-day computer programming.

The book expands Turing’s original 36-page paper with additional background chapters and extensive annotations; the author elaborates on and clarifies many of Turing’s statements, making the original difficult-to-read document accessible to present day programmers, computer science majors, math geeks, and others.

Interwoven into the narrative are the highlights of Turing’s own life: his years at Cambridge and Princeton, his secret work in cryptanalysis during World War II, his involvement in seminal computer projects, his speculations about artificial intelligence, his arrest and prosecution for the crime of "gross indecency," and his early death by apparent suicide at the age of 41.

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Customer Reviews

Rich and surprisingly accessible
Don't let the title fool you: This isn't simply Alan Turing's groundbreaking paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" with a handful of footnotes thrown in. While the paper is contained here in its entirety, there is, on average, about a paragraph of explanation for each line of Turing's prose. And before that, there is an extensive introduction to important concepts, starting with the distinctions between rational, irrational, algebraic, transcendental, and computable numbers--all explained in terms that any intelligent undergraduate should be able to understand. No mathematical background is assumed beyond algebra.

The Annotated Turing exceeds even the best undergraduate textbooks in explaining these concepts clearly yet concisely, and in doing so sets up the historical context that Turing worked in. When there is an interesting story to tell about Hilbert or Russell, he tells it. (Russell's life was, after all, sufficiently fascinating to be the subject of a recent comic book, Logicomix.) Those with a more extensive mathematical background will want to skim the early sections, but shouldn't skip them entirely.

What Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach did for Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem--a crucial discovery that was poorly understood outside of the domain of professional mathematicians--Petzold's book does for Turing's universal computer. If you have any interest whatsoever in the theory of computing, make this the first book you read.

2009-12-31 (Ann Arbor, MI) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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A 10 year quest to understand Turing's paper ends here
It was about 10 years ago when I first found Turing's original paper on Internet and thought it wouldn't be so hard to read and understand it (after all its "mere" computer science). Since then I've tried to digest it quite a few times on and off and never actually succeeded. Infect most of the time I got stuck on few nitty-gritty and just couldn't move forward. I have even bought/borrowed almost all books on the subject that falls in to "popular science" types. Needless to say, like many such books in same category, they just never go in to details and are practically useless for all practical purposes :).

So imagine my surprise when I see a book with title "Annotated Turing" and by none other than Charles Petzold who I've known as author who normally writes programming books. That surprise was only a start. I was simply shocked when I opened the book. It was as-if someone read your dream and made it a reality with absolute precision with zero compromises. If there is one such book like this for all of the milestone scientific papers, there would be a revolution in learning.

Let me put out some points what makes this book so perfect. Not just wishy-washy "near perfect", I'm saying SO PERFECT.
*First, the book contains explanation of every single line in Turing's paper. Literally. The format of the book is a line quoted from Turing's paper in bold and a paragraph or so of explanation and discussions for that line. Author's claim is that you can actually cut out all those lines and stitch them to recreate the Turing's paper in its entirety complete with page numbers! Now that's what I call precision.
*The book also includes all encompassing big picture overview, historical situation, importance, consequences and so on - nicely preparing reader for the journey.
*The book is so readable that I usually forget I'm reading a very technical book that goes in to very core of computer science. It's like nicest computer science professor reads you the paper line by line and answers all your questions, even those completely stupid ones.
*As I'd doubted many times, there are lots of errors in Turning original paper. This book amazingly points them out and corrects even the minor misprints. I'm just surprised how author even know so much "insider" details about those trivial misprints and errors.
*Turing's paper is full of obscure strange symbols (have you seen old gothic German font?) that are common in scientific literature today. Author explains all these symbols, what they mean, where they came from, what are the subtle differences and so on. Just amazing.
*Turing's paper have lot of omissions for explanations and steps which he probably left out as "exercise for reader" to keep his paper short. Sometime you might get stuck in those exercises and if you are not in academia you probably have no external help. This book deals with all these omissions and expands so beautifully on them that I can't imagine if there any better way to describe them.
*Apart from omissions, there are lot of shortcuts that Turing employs with rather flitting explanations or sometime absolutely none. This book covers you 100% for these shortcuts.
*A big part of understanding Turing's paper is actually mentally running his machine's step by step for all the examples he puts out. This book actually does this step-by-step run explanation making it so easier to read and understand quickly.

Anyway, some of you might think why one should even bother about reading this ancient computer science paper in first place? Answer is huge changes in the way we have started viewing universe recently. While Seth Lloyd's book "Programming the Universe" does good job of explaining this thinking, the summary is that the universe can be seen as computing machine rather than particle and energies in the realms of physics. There was even a paper that proposed that even a simple system consisting of billiard balls interacting in space is Turing complete! That means by setting billiards balls in some initial points in space and velocity can computer anything that your laptop can compute in theory. To understand advances in this area you have to fully understand what is Turing's machine and what it means to be Turing complete and how one can prove that a certain system is computationally Turing complete. That's where the paper comes in. Text books just don't do justice.

2009-09-26 (WA, United States) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 5

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Interesting...
I've just skimmed this book, so far, and will read it closely soon. However, I can't possibly be the only one to see the error at the start of Chapter 2 where he equates the counting numbers and the cardinal numbers. Surely all the mathematicians caught it - didn't they? The cardinals include 0, but he starts off with the series "1, 2, 3..." I note that Mathworld contains the same error, but wikipedia does not. The wikipedia article is better.

2009-08-17 (Los Altos, CA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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excellent!
The great ideas that are our intellectual inheritance are much less valuable if only a privileged few can understand them. We need more books like this one!

2009-07-02 (Denver, CO) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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A difficult but rewarding book
Petzold makes a great effort towards explaining Turing's famous proof. Turing's scheme of variable naming was extremely difficult for me to follow and so many formula's, particularly towards the end of the book where they become increasingly complex, were beyond me even with Petzold's clear and complete explanations. I was able to follow Petzold's explanations for why Turing takes the path he does throughout the book and overall feel that though I couldn't grasp some of the technicalities, I have an appreciation for the logical path Turing went down in envisioning his machine, and the role he played in the emergence of computers.

2008-11-30 (Chicago) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 4

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The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer (Great Discoveries)

Description

A "skillful and literate" (New York Times Book Review) biography of the persecuted genius who helped create the modern computer. To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating "treatment" that may have led to his suicide.

With a novelist's sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity—his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor—and elegantly explains his work and its implications. .

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Customer Reviews

Impenetrable
As one who had been a fan of David Leavitt's previous work, I approached this book with certain expectations. Yes it was non-fiction etc. But I found it completely unreadable. Perhaps I should have just skipped over the turgid mathematical sections...but I was unable to without a sense that something essential would be lost...and yet those sections were Impenetrable. Unless you are a mathematician, I would suggest passing over this book in silence...

2010-07-26 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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The Most Helpful Discussion of What Turing Machines Do (from Ahadada Books)
If this book were instead a photograph of the subject, I would imagine Man Ray being the photographer, with the young Turing posed in such a manner that deep shadows are raked across his features. We have patches of pure light in this book--for instance in the author's explanation of exactly what Turing Machines do and how they do it, which I found to be one of the best sections of the book, and then we have the other parts which are handled well fact-wise, but without much of an imparting of the character of the subject. Leavitt tells us several times that Turing indeed had the ability not to impress himself upon his teachers and his colleagues, and perhaps was simply carrying over the biographical fact into the writing. These are the shadowy sections of the portrait we posit in which Turing seems to recede in favor of passages from E.M. Forster or of Leavitt's own interpretations of the possible psychological underpinnings of certain of Turing's ideas regarding intelligent machines. In these darknesses we see that Turing was close to his mother, yet this information is left tantalizingly vague. We get flashes of Turing's rather cruel sense of pedagogy, but this too is dropped into the murk. The central metaphor of "loss" in this tragedy is Turing's relationship with Christopher Morcom, the gifted young man whose early death stood as a kind of absolute in the genius' thought, yet that central experience is not delved into but remains ambiguously described, though it provides the frisson--the startling sense of closure--in the final sentence of the book. The "cracker jack prize" I was hoping to find buried in The Man Who Knew Too Much--an illumination of Wittgenstein's relationship with Turing--was missing. We see him sitting a bit like a rabbit stunned in the intense glare of the philosopher's regard, reiterating his mathematician's sense of the consequence of contradictions in closed systems, but we are left only with that. In short, this is an interesting picture to hang on the wall and contemplate, and a useful one in parts, but one that strikes this reader as being curiously incomplete, shadowy, and in many places--inert. Still, this is a good book and one that's worth a read.

2008-05-07 | Jesse Glass (Urayasu, Chiba Japan) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Easy read for the most part
I considered writing a bad review of this book some time back, but I finally compelled myself to finish reading the whole thing, and I have to redact my original thoughts that this work needed some help.

While it is true that unless you have taken a class in automata theory, you may get lost about half way through this book, it is well worth completing in order to come to grips with the whole story that encompasses Mr. Turing.

While true, Leavitt focuses on a primarily homosexual perspective of Turing, it does provide an alternative look at the man. I do feel that at times more than ample creative license was taken in this regard and wished that more attention might have been in critical analysis of Turing's personal papers which led Leavitt to these conclusions. Given that Leavitt takes such considerable pains to explain the context within which Turing's mathematical process took place, describing those around him, professors he did not even associate with... on and on, this seemed a bit odd and out of place with the rest of the story.

Anyway, I am glad I read it only for the references to other books that I have started to enjoy, including both Alan's mother's biography and the Enigma by Hodges.

I would also recommend to others who enjoy Turing history to look into BBC4's video, "Dangerous Thoughts". You can find it on google videos.

2007-11-04 (Cary, NC United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Somewhere in Here is a Biography
Leavitt spent a lot of time teaching himself mathematics and learning the early science of how computers worked. The problem is that he spends half the book going over the theorems of Turning and some of his contemporaries. This is all fine and good, if math is your thing. Zeta probabilities and the function of (prime numbers at n-1 or something like that) have no interest for the average laymen; and especially for those of us who never got past algebra and think calculus is hard skin on the bottom of your foot.

This makes the title sort of a double entendre, leaving all of us at the short end of the stick because if he learned it, he told it to us. Some of the explanations run eight or ten pages. This of course makes reading this short book (under 300 pages) even shorter, though it's like hitting yourself in the head, it only feels great when it's over. If your a good skimmer and know where to look it's probably an enjoyable book. In my case I kept hoping that it would get more interesting but it never did.

More on Turing's life (or maybe there just wasn't any more) would have been preferable to more on his mathematical findings.

2007-07-12 | Zeb Kantrowitz (North Waltham, MA United States) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 2

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not a bad airplane read
Not bad over all, at times goes on a bit to much about his homosexuality. Main reason for 3 and not 4 stars is the title, nothing in the book deals how he "knew too much".

2007-07-11 | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 3

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The Essential Turing

Description

Alan Turing was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. In 1935, aged 22, he developed the mathematical theory upon which all subsequent stored-program digital computers are modeled. At the outbreak of hostilities with Germany in September 1939, he joined the Goverment Codebreaking team at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire and played a crucial role in deciphering Engima, the code used by the German armed forces to protect their radio communications. Turing's work on the version of Enigma used by the German navy was vital to the battle for supremacy in the North Atlantic. He also contributed to the attack on the cyphers known as 'Fish,' which were used by the German High Command for the encryption of signals during the latter part of the war. His contribution helped to shorten the war in Europe by an estimated two years. After the war, his theoretical work led to the development of Britain's first computers at the National Physical Laboratory and the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at Manchester University. Turing was also a founding father of modern cognitive science, theorizing that the cortex at birth is an 'unorganized machine' which through 'training' becomes organized 'into a universal machine or something like it.' He went on to develop the use of computers to model biological growth, launching the discipline now referred to as Artificial Life. The papers in this book are the key works for understanding Turing's phenomenal contribution across all these fields. The collection includes Turing's declassified wartime 'Treatise on the Enigma'; letters from Turing to Churchill and to codebreakers; lectures, papers, and broadcasts which opened up the concept of AI and its implications; and the paper which formed the genesis of the investigation of Artifical Life.

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Customer Reviews

An excellent edition, long overdue
Enjoy this profound book by the father of the Digital Age. The Essential Turing is an excellent edition and long overdue. Turing's essential works are finally available in a single volume. Turing is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century--he was rated up there with Einstein in Time magazine's 'The Century's Greatest Minds'. Copeland's lucid commentaries on Turing's work are fascinating and helpful. OUP is to be congratulated on putting Turing into the hands of the popular science book-buyer at long last.

2005-10-25 | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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a long overdue book
A long overdue book. Copeland collects together Turing's greatest papers. As in where Turing tackled the fundamentals of what is now called a Turing machine - ie. a universal computer. Plus other papers where Turing ruminated on artificial intelligence, and founded that field. Plus coming up with the Turing Test for AI.

Turing's papers are interleaved with chapters by Copeland that give extra context to the times in which Turing lived. Notably on Turing's crucial contribution to the Enigma project at Bletchley Park during World War 2. It is no exaggeration to say that his insight into decoding the German encryptions saved the lives of thousands of Allied soldiers.

Valuable also is a reprinting of Turing's "Treatise on the Enigma", which was only declassified in 1996. Though by then, its essence had been known for decades. Finally, the book lets you read Turing's words on Enigma.

2005-09-12 (Terra, Sol 3) | Helpful Votes: 8 | Rating: 5

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Most Accessible Introduction to Turing
This is a terrific book. Turing is one of the most important figures of our time. Copeland's lucid and helpful introductions to Turing's key works make fascinating reading. (The hundreds of footnotes are testimony to the depth of scholarship that underlies Copeland's smooth prose.) Copeland makes Turing, and so the origins of the digital age, accessible to all.

2005-08-21 | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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A valuable addition in paraphrasing Turing
Copeland's "Essential Turing" reviews Turning's major writings and is a valuable source of knowledge for computer scientists and avid CS/Mathematics readers alike. Turing was a brilliant British mathematician, logician, and cryptographer and is widely considered to be the father of computer science. This book doesn't portray him merely as a code breaker but also provides commentary on his brilliant foundation work as on Artificial intelligence. Discussion on the ultimate Turing test (proposal for a test of a machine's capability to perform human-like conversation) and Entscheidungs Problem is worth reading.

I shelve this book next to Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" which may state what it's worth.

2005-03-22 (Monrovia, CA, USA) | Helpful Votes: 10 | Rating: 4

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A collection of Turing's papers
Copeland's book is basically a collection of some of Turing's original papers, completed with a short introduction for each part of the book. I was disappointed by this book as (1) one can easily find copies of Turing's work on the web, (2) there is very little additional value in Copeland's comments, and (3) the papers are not reproduced in their original typeset and layout. Elsevier's "Collected Works of A. M. Turing" (4 volumes) does a much better job and offers Turing's complete work.

2005-03-01 (NJ, USA) | Helpful Votes: 23 | Rating: 1

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Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker

Description

Written by a distinguished cast of contributors, this book is the definitive collection of essays in commemoration of Alan Turing. The volume spans the entire rich spectrum of his life, thoughts, and legacy, but also sheds some new light on the future of computing science with a chapter contributed by visionary Ray Kurzweil.

Further important contributions come from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the Turing biographer Andrew Hodges, and the distinguished logician Martin Davis, who provides a first critical essay on an emerging and controversial field termed hypercomputation.

A special highlight of the book is the play by Valeria Patera that examines the scandal surrounding the last apple, and presents as an enigma, the life, death, and destiny of the man who did so much to decipher the Nazi enigma code during the Second World War. By contrast, deciphering the meaning of Alan's life remains much more difficult.

The book also contains a chapter on Turing's last, almost lost, somehow obscure, and ill-understood work on Fibonacci phyllotaxis, and a chapter on his almost forgotten connectionist ideas.

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Customer Reviews

Turing died too soon
Teuscher has gathered together a set of thought provoking essays about Turing and the ideas he espoused. The diverse range of the essays is a good reflection of Turing's genius.

The essay on making a self-replicating Turing machine reflects earlier speculations on what might more generally be considered a self-replicating Neumann machine.

There is a palpable sense of loss in the book. Turing died at a relatively young age. What if he had lived decades longer? He could have seen the immense flowering of computing, in hardware and software. With his genius, what other insights might he have given us? If you wish, you can regard the book as speculations into this unknowable.

One of the book's authors, Copeland, has recently edited another book -'The Essential Turing', which has essays by Turing himself, and you may want to look at that text.

2005-09-17 (Terra, Sol 3) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 5

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Man of many parts
This book celebrates the 90th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing by bringing together a large set of essays on topics as diverse and colourful as the work and life of the man himself. Turing's fundamental contributions to computing kick started the modern computing era. However, he also made early and outstanding contributions to artificial intelligence, artificial neural networks, morphogenesis, cryptology and the philosophy of mind. The book touches on all these areas and includes contributions from luminaries such as Martin Davis, Daniel Dennett, Andrew Hodges, Douglas Hofstadter and Ray Kurzweil. The book also contains some essays on contemporary topics related to Turing's work such as the controversial area of so-called hypercomputation. While many of the essays are advanced, the material remains accessible and interesting. Turing had a strikingly original and whimsical imagination - reflecting this, and unlike many books on technical topics, this one includes some of the kind of speculation that is bound to fire the imagination of readers. Will computers outstrip human intelligence, and when might it happen? Will we become more like computers, or will they become more like us? Ninety years on from the birth of Alan Turing such issues are more relevant and pressing than ever, and this book makes an excellent advanced introduction to the breadth of Turing's work.

2004-07-12 (Auckland, New Zealand) | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 5

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Mathematical Logic, Volume 4 (Turing, Alan Mathison, Works.)

Description

Hardbound.

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