EPISTOLARIO DE LÁZARO CÁRDENAS 1

Book Description

Alan Turing, pioneer of computing and WWII codebreaker, is 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. An introduction by leading Turing expert Jack Copeland provides the background and guides the reader through the selection. About Alan Turing Alan Turing FRS OBE, (1912-1954) studied mathematics at King's College, Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow of King's in March 1935, at the age of only 22. In the same year he invented the abstract computing machines - now known simply as Turing machines - on which all subsequent stored-program digital computers are modelled. During 1936-1938 Turing continued his studies, now at Princeton University. He completed a PhD in mathematical logic, analysing the notion of 'intuition' in mathematics and introducing the idea of oracular computation, now fundamental in mathematical recursion theory. An 'oracle' is an abstract device able to solve mathematical problems too difficult for the universal Turing machine. In the summer of 1938 Turing returned to his Fellowship at King's. When WWII started in 1939 he joined the wartime headquarters of the Government Code and Cypher School (GCandCS) at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. Building on earlier work by Polish cryptanalysts, Turing contributed crucially to the design of electro-mechanical machines ('bombes') used to decipher Enigma, the code by means of which the German armed forces sought 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'. Based on binary teleprinter code, Fish was used during the latter part of the war in preference to morse-based Enigma for the encryption of high-level signals, for example messages from Hitler and other members of the German High Command. It is estimated that the work of GCandCS shortened the war in Europe by at least two years. Turing received the Order of the British Empire for the part he played. In 1945, the war over, Turing was recruited to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London, his brief to design and develop an electronic computer - a concrete form of the universal Turing machine. Turing's report setting out his design for the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was the first relatively complete specification of an electronic stored-program general-purpose digital computer. Delays beyond Turing's control resulted in NPL's losing the race to build the world's first working electronic stored-program digital computer - an honour that went to the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at Manchester University, in June 1948. Discouraged by the delays at NPL, Turing took up the Deputy Directorship of the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory in that year. Turing was a founding father of modern cognitive science and a leading early exponent of the hypothesis that the human brain is in large part a digital computing machine, theorising that the cortex at birth is an 'unorganised machine' which through 'training' becomes organised 'into a universal machine or something like it'. He also pioneered Artificial Intelligence. Turing spent the rest of his short career at Manchester University, being appointed to a specially created Readership in the Theory of Computing in May 1953. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in March 1951 (a high honour). In March 1952 he was prosecuted for his homosexuality, then a crime in Britain, and sentenced to a period of twelve months hormone 'therapy'. From 1951 Turing worked on what would now be called Artificial Life, using the Ferranti Mark I computer to model aspects of biological growth, in particular a chemical mechanism by which the genes of a zygote could determine the anatomical structure of the resulting animal or plant. He died in the midst of this groundbreaking work.

Customer Reviews:

An excellent edition, long overdue.......2005-10-25

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.

a long overdue book.......2005-09-12

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.

Most Accessible Introduction to Turing.......2005-08-22

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.

A valuable addition in paraphrasing Turing.......2005-03-22

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.

A collection of Turing's papers.......2005-03-01

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.

Average customer rating:

interesting portrait of a compelling misfit
A scientifically useful biography
Good biography, perhaps too long.
Essential.
Too much detail for me

Alan Turing: The Enigma
Andrew Hodges
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster (Paper)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0671528092

Amazon.com

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

Book Description

Alan Turing (1912-54) 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 in his prophecy for the twenty-first century.

Drawn in to 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.

Customer Reviews:

interesting portrait of a compelling misfit.......2004-07-09

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.

A scientifically useful biography.......2004-02-04

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.

Good biography, perhaps too long........2003-10-24

If you consider to read this book in order to know about Alan Turing's life, definetely this is the book. In it you will learn about the code breakers, about the WWII spy technology and also about the science aplied to War, however, when I read it I found out that sometimes too many pages (550) can make it boring (more than 20 pages dedicate about how to build a subroutine in a program, more than 20 pages about homosexuality laws, more than 20 pages about historic information from India). Being so detailed makes sometimes forget about the main issue. That is why I didn't give it 5 stars.

Essential........2003-09-20

The one and only Turing biography you'll ever need, long enough to satisfy even the most hardcore Turing admirers. Irreproachably researched and thorough. I only wish Hodges offered an abridged version I could recommend to my friends- this book is too detailed for casual readers.

Too much detail for me.......2002-09-26

I found the story of Alan Turing's life to be very interesting. His original work on dreaming up a "thinking machine" that would eventually become what we know as a computer and his work on breaking the German "enigma" code are worth knowing about. His tragic end is cause for us all to remember the importance of tolerance. However, I found this book to be too long and detailed for my tastes. I think the story could have been told in one half or one third the space. So I would recommend that anyone interested in the history of science read a biography of Turing, but a different one than this book.

Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker

Average customer rating:

Turing died too soon
Man of many parts

Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker
Christof Teuscher
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 3540200207

Book Description

Alan Turing's fundamental contributions to computing led to the development of modern computing technology, and his work continues to inspire researchers in computing science and beyond. This book is the definitive collection of commemorative essays, and the distinguished contributors have expertise in such diverse fields as artificial intelligence, natural computing, mathematics, physics, cryptology, cognitive studies, philosophy and anthropology. The volume spans the entire rich spectrum of Turing's life, research work and legacy. New light is shed on the future of computing science by visionary Ray Kurzweil. Notable 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 feature of the book is the play by Valeria Patera which tackles 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 Enigma code during the Second World War. Other chapters are modern reappraisals of Turing's work on computability, and deal with the major philosophical questions raised by the Turing Test, while the book also contains essays addressing his less well-known ideas on Fibonacci phyllotaxis and connectionism.

Customer Reviews:

Turing died too soon.......2005-09-18

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.

Man of many parts.......2004-07-13

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.

Alan Turing, Enigma, Computerkulture, Bd 1 (German Edition)

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Alan Turing, Enigma, Computerkulture, Bd 1 (German Edition)
A. Hodges
Manufacturer: Springer-Verlag
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Average customer rating:

Alan Turing: The Enigma
Andrew Hodges
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OLRHEC

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Alan Turing: The Enigma

Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000F6NO84

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Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence
Andrew Hodges
Manufacturer: Counterpoint
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000K9VD84

The Essential Turing : Seminal Writings in Computing, Logic, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial Life plus The Secrets of Enigma

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The Essential Turing : Seminal Writings in Computing, Logic, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial Life plus The Secrets of Enigma
Alan M. Turing
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

The Essential Turing: Seminal Writings in Computing, Logic, Philosophy, Artificial Intellegence, And Artificial Life; Plus The Secrets Of Enigma

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The Essential Turing: Seminal Writings in Computing, Logic, Philosophy, Artificial Intellegence, And Artificial Life; Plus The Secrets Of Enigma
Alan Mathison Turing B. Jack Copeland
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Essential Turing: Seminal Writings In Computing, Logic, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, And Artificial Life Plus The Secrets Of Enigma
Alan M. Turing
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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