|
|||||||||
Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Code-breaking Computers by Jack Copeland  (3)
£12.34
|
Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges  (8)
£6.99
|
The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing by Martin Davis (1)
£13.82
|
Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret by Paul Gannon  (4)
£9.09
|
Turing and the Universal Machine: The Making of the Modern Computer (Revolutions in Science) by Jon Agar (4)
£4.49
|
Product details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? (We'll ask you to sign in so we can get back to you)
|
| Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested in These Sponsored Links (What is this?) |
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 (GC&CS) 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 GC&CS 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.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Synopsis
Alan Turing was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th cwentury. In 1935, aged 22, he developed the mathematicl theory which explained what computers would and would not be able to do. All subsequent computer design was modelled on this work. At the outbreak of hostilities with Germany in September 1939, he hoined the Goverment Codebreaking team at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire and played a crucial part in deciphering the Engima code. After the war, his theoretical work was turned into reality as he developed Britain's first computers at the National Physical Laboratory and the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at Manchester University. Turing also worked extensively on the study of how the mind operates. He was a founding father of modern cognitive science and pioneered the concept of Artifical Intelligence. He developed the use of computers to model biological growth, launching the discipline now referred to as Artificial Life. The papers in this book are the key works for understanding Turing's phenomenal contribution across all these fields.
Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker by Christof Teuscher
£43.70
|
The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine by C. Petzold
£13.19
|
Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges (8)
£6.99
|
The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing by Martin Davis (1)
£13.82
|
Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Code-breaking Computers by Jack Copeland (3)
£12.34
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
(
