The world of computation according to Turing, an interactive
tutoring program, as told to star-crossed lovers: a novel. Our hero
is Turing, an interactive tutoring program and namesake (or virtual
emanation?) of Alan Turing, World War II code breaker and father of
computer science. In this unusual novel, Turing's idiosyncratic
version of intellectual history from a computational point of view
unfolds in tandem with the story of a love affair involving Ethel,
a successful computer executive, Alexandros, a melancholy
archaeologist, and Ian, a charismatic hacker. After Ethel (who
shares her first name with Alan Turing's mother) abandons
Alexandros following a sundrenched idyll on Corfu, Turing appears
on Alexandros's computer screen to unfurl a tutorial on the history
of ideas. He begins with the philosopher-mathematicians of ancient
Greece-"discourse, dialogue, argument, proof... can only thrive in
an egalitarian society"-and the Arab scholar in ninth-century
Baghdad who invented algorithms; he moves on to many other topics,
including cryptography and artificial intelligence, even economics
and developmental biology. (These lessons are later critiqued
amusingly and developed further in postings by a fictional
newsgroup in the book's afterword.) As Turing's lectures progress,
the lives of Alexandros, Ethel, and Ian converge in dramatic
fashion, and the story takes us from Corfu to Hong Kong, from
Athens to San Francisco-and of course to the Internet, the
disruptive technological and social force that emerges as the main
locale and protagonist of the novel. Alternately pedagogical and
romantic, Turing (A Novel about Computation) should appeal both to
students and professionals who want a clear and entertaining
account of the development of computation and to the general reader
who enjoys novels of ideas.
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