Alan Turing: The Enigma

Author: Andrew Hodges
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400865123
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 777

Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912–1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the computer and artificial intelligence, and anticipated gay liberation by decades—all before his suicide at age forty-one. This New York Times bestselling biography of the founder of computer science, with a new preface by the author that addresses Turing’s royal pardon in 2013, is the definitive account of an extraordinary mind and life. Capturing both the inner and outer drama of Turing’s life, Andrew Hodges tells how Turing’s revolutionary idea of 1936—the concept of a universal machine—laid the foundation for the modern computer and how Turing brought the idea to practical realization in 1945 with his electronic design. The book also tells how this work was directly related to Turing’s leading role in breaking the German Enigma ciphers during World War II, a scientific triumph that was critical to Allied victory in the Atlantic. At the same time, this is the tragic account of a man who, despite his wartime service, was eventually arrested, stripped of his security clearance, and forced to undergo a humiliating treatment program—all for trying to live honestly in a society that defined homosexuality as a crime. The inspiration for a major motion picture starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, Alan Turing: The Enigma is a gripping story of mathematics, computers, cryptography, and homosexual persecution.

Turing's Vision

Author: Chris Bernhardt
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262034549
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
In 1936, when he was just twenty-four years old, Alan Turing wrote a remarkable paper in which he outlined the theory of computation, laying out the ideas that underlie all modern computers. This groundbreaking and powerful theory now forms the basis of computer science. In Turing's Vision, Chris Bernhardt explains the theory, Turing's most important contribution, for the general reader. Bernhardt argues that the strength of Turing's theory is its simplicity, and that, explained in a straightforward manner, it is eminently understandable by the nonspecialist. As Marvin Minsky writes, "The sheer simplicity of the theory's foundation and extraordinary short path from this foundation to its logical and surprising conclusions give the theory a mathematical beauty that alone guarantees it a permanent place in computer theory." Bernhardt begins with the foundation and systematically builds to the surprising conclusions. He also views Turing's theory in the context of mathematical history, other views of computation (including those of Alonzo Church), Turing's later work, and the birth of the modern computer. In the paper, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," Turing thinks carefully about how humans perform computation, breaking it down into a sequence of steps, and then constructs theoretical machines capable of performing each step. Turing wanted to show that there were problems that were beyond any computer's ability to solve; in particular, he wanted to find a decision problem that he could prove was undecidable. To explain Turing's ideas, Bernhardt examines three well-known decision problems to explore the concept of undecidability; investigates theoretical computing machines, including Turing machines; explains universal machines; and proves that certain problems are undecidable, including Turing's problem concerning computable numbers.

The Annotated Turing

Author: Charles Petzold
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470229055
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 391

Book 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.

Alan M. Turing

Author: Sara Turing
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107020581
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Book Description
Containing never-before-published material, this fascinating account sheds new light on one of the greatest figures of the twentieth century.

Turing’s Connectionism

Author: Christof Teuscher
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1447101618
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Book Description
Christof Teuscher revives, analyzes, and simulates Turing's ideas, applying them to different types of problems, and building and training Turing's machines using evolutionary algorithms. In a little known paper entitled 'Intelligent Machinery' Turing investigated connectionist networks, but his work was dismissed as a 'schoolboy essay'and it was left unpublished until 1968, 14 years after his death. This is not a book about today's (classical) neural networks, but about the neuron network-like structures proposed by Turing. One of its novel features is that it actually goes beyond Turing's ideas by proposing new machines. The book also contains a Foreward by B. Jack Copeland and D. Proudfoot.

Alan Turing

Author: S. Barry Cooper
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0123870127
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 937

Book Description
In this 2013 winner of the prestigious R.R. Hawkins Award from the Association of American Publishers, as well as the 2013 PROSE Awards for Mathematics and Best in Physical Sciences & Mathematics, also from the AAP, readers will find many of the most significant contributions from the four-volume set of the Collected Works of A. M. Turing. These contributions, together with commentaries from current experts in a wide spectrum of fields and backgrounds, provide insight on the significance and contemporary impact of Alan Turing's work. Offering a more modern perspective than anything currently available, Alan Turing: His Work and Impact gives wide coverage of the many ways in which Turing's scientific endeavors have impacted current research and understanding of the world. His pivotal writings on subjects including computing, artificial intelligence, cryptography, morphogenesis, and more display continued relevance and insight into today's scientific and technological landscape. This collection provides a great service to researchers, but is also an approachable entry point for readers with limited training in the science, but an urge to learn more about the details of Turing's work. - 2013 winner of the prestigious R.R. Hawkins Award from the Association of American Publishers, as well as the 2013 PROSE Awards for Mathematics and Best in Physical Sciences & Mathematics, also from the AAP - Named a 2013 Notable Computer Book in Computing Milieux by Computing Reviews - Affordable, key collection of the most significant papers by A.M. Turing - Commentary explaining the significance of each seminal paper by preeminent leaders in the field - Additional resources available online

Turing's Cathedral

Author: George Dyson
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0375422773
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
Documents the innovations of a group of eccentric geniuses who developed computer code in the mid-20th century as part of mathematician Alan Turin's theoretical universal machine idea, exploring how their ideas led to such developments as digital television, modern genetics and the hydrogen bomb.

The Alan Turing Codebreaker's Puzzle Book

Author:
Publisher: Sirius Entertainment
ISBN: 9781788287166
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Published in association with The Turing Trust, this incredible collection of puzzles allows you to test if you have the range of puzzle-solving abilities required to have been one of Alan Turing's codebreakers.

Natural Wonders

Author: Edwin Tenney Brewster
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Book Description
Edwin Tenney Brewster was an American physicist and popular science writer. Natural Wonders is a partly illustrated book for both adults and children, presenting numerous cases of how animals are born.

The Essential Turing

Author: B. J. Copeland
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191606863
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1428

Book Description
The ideas that gave birth to the computer age Alan Turing, pioneer of computing and WWII codebreaker, was one of the most important and influential thinkers of the twentieth century. In this volume for the first time his key writings are made available to a broad, non-specialist readership. They make fascinating reading both in their own right and for their historic significance: contemporary computational theory, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and artificial life all spring from this ground-breaking work, which is also rich in philosophical and logical insight.