| The Essential Turing |
| Saturday, 15 January 2005 | |
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Edited by B. Jack Copeland (Oxford University Press, 2004, £14.99). Reviewed by Tom Walters
This is not a popular science book; the first of Turing’s writings to appear is On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, in which he develops what came to be known as the Turing Machine. This paper, like many of those that follow, is heavy on maths, formal logic and number theory. However, there are some less mathematical gems interspersed. History of Hut 8 to December 1941 by Patrick Mahon, a contemporary of Turing’s at Bletchley Park, was declassified only in 1996 and provides a first-hand account of Hut 8’s breaking of naval codes. The rest of the Enigma section is filled with similar primary sources, which would make fascinating further reading for anyone gripped by recent popular accounts of the wartime code breaking at Bletchley, including a letter from Turing and his compatriots to Churchill.
The final sections, on artificial life and intelligence, deal with Turing’s fascinations during the latter years of his life. The essay, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, expounds the ‘Turing Test’, a game Turing controversially suggested might be the criterion on which machine intelligence should be judged. This book gives any reader with a reasonably strong mathematical background the opportunity to study logic, artificial intelligence and the very fundamentals of computer science in the words of the man who developed them, and to see in action the processes that led to the development of these ideas. However, the more mathematical elements should not frighten off the casual reader, and anyone with an interest in the life of Turing would not be disappointed by the wealth of information surrounding the maths and science that Copeland has woven in. On dipping into a particular section, the reader is likely to be gripped, and to emerge several pages later even more amazed at the man who produced such a wide range of innovative fundamental ideas in such a short life. Tom Walters is a Research Assistant in the Department of Physiology |
The Essential Turing is a collection of the key writings of Alan Turing and his correspondence with contemporaries, covering computing, logic, philosophy, artificial intelligence and code breaking. Spanning the whole of Turing’s life, the book is broadly chronological, but is interspersed with essays by Copeland. These essays, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, Enigma and Computable Numbers: A Guide, provide a lucid preparation for the writings that follow. | Next > |
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