Written by a distinguished cast of contributors, Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker is the definitive collection of essays in commemoration of the 90th birthday of Alan Turing. This fascinating text covers the rich facets of his life, thoughts, and legacy, but also sheds some light on the future of computing science with a chapter contributed by visionary Ray Kurzweil, winner of the 1999 National Medal of Technology. Further, important contributions come from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the Turing biographer Andrew Hodges, and from the distinguished logician Martin Davis, who provides a first critical essay on an emerging and controversial field termed "hypercomputation."

Turing's connectionism provides a detailed and in-depth analysis of Turing's almost forgotten ideas on connectionist machines. In a little known paper entitled "Intelligent Machinery", Turing already investigated connectionist models as early as 1948. Unfortunately, his work was dismissed by his employer as a "schoolboy essay" and went unpublished until 1968, 14 years after his death.In this book, Christof Teuscher analyzes all aspects of Turing's "unorganized machines". Turing himself also proposed a sort of genetic algorithm to train the networks. This idea has been resumed by the author and genetic algorithms are used to build and train Turing's unorganized machines. Teuscher's work starts from Turing's initial ideas, but importantly goes beyond them. Many new kinds of machines and new aspects are considered, e.g., hardware implementation, analysis of the complex dynamics of the networks, hypercomputation, and learning algorithms.