The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper On Computablilty And The Turing Machine

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.

CONTENTS:

Introduction.

  Part I: Foundations.

  
Chapter 1: This Tomb Holds Diophantus.

  
Chapter 2: The Irrational and the Transcendental.

  
Chapter 3: Centuries of Progress.

  Part II: Computable Numbers.

  
Chapter 4: The Education of Alan Turing.

  
Chapter 5: Machines at Work.

  
Chapter 6: Addition and Multiplication.

  
Chapter 7: Also Known as Subroutines.

  
Chapter 8: Everything Is a Number.

  
Chapter 9: The Universal Machine.

  
Chapter 10: Computers and Computability.

  
Chapter 11: Of Machines and Men.

  Part III: Das Entscheidungsproblem.

  
Chapter 12: Logic and Computability.

  
Chapter 13: Computable Functions.

  
Chapter 14: The Major Proof.

  
Chapter 15: The Lambda Calculus.

  
Chapter 16: Conceiving the Continuum.

  Part IV And Beyond.

  
Chapter 17: Is Everything a Turing Machine?

  
Chapter 18: The Long Sleep of Diophantus.

  
Selected Bibliography.

  
Index.