Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George B. Dyson

Mar 29, 2013 Greg rated it 3 of 5 stars

The title is a little misleading. This book is mostly a biography of John von Neumann and concurrently, a story of the early decades of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The stories are well researched and rich in detail, but at times hard to follow. I think this comes from abrupt changes in the timeline within related chapters. What comes across clearly is the value of interdisciplinary collaboration among genius level scientists and engineers in the presence of new electronic tool...more

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Mar 23, 2013 Jeff rated it 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed reading this, and learned several new things while doing so. The book is not at all about Alan Turing. If it is a biography of anybody, it is John von Neuman; but really it is about many people, centered around the IAS in Princeton, who played a role in early computer development. There is also a lot of discussion about the development of nuclear and thermo-nuclear weapons, as one of the first applications of electronic computing.

Two big downsides prevent me from rating this book high...more

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Mar 04, 2013 John Behle rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: communicators

Recommended to John by: library staff

In several reviews, this book has been called a nerd's labor of love. Okay, but it is also exceptionally well written. The sentences are crafted to keep pulling one in to the action. This is not a direct timeline book, though. Dyson introduces the players as they enter the drama of advancing computing.

It is not bog down with old techno speak and specifications. Dyson sprinkles in the interesting facts just as needed. The massive 30 ton computers of the late 1940s did have over 17,000 vacuum tub...more

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Dec 11, 2012 Alan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: The digitally initiated

Recommended to Alan by: Title and topic

Turing's Cathedral is a long, enthusiastic and articulate ramble throughout the early history of computing, a solid work constructed over a great deal of time by a keen observer who has an insider's perspective on many of that history's most pivotal moments. George Dyson is the son of the famous physicist Freeman Dyson, and as a child he must have met many of the principals of this story while they were working at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey (although at the t...more

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Nov 27, 2012 David rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: those interested in the history of numerical computation

Shelves: history, computers, mathematics, science, audiobook

Despite the title, this book is not primarily about Alan Turing. It is really about the group of people at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton. Much of the book focuses on John von Neumann, who spearheaded the effort to build some of the earliest electronic computers. These first computers were very unreliable--incorrect results were as likely due to faulty vacuum tubes as coding errors. In fact, circuits had to be designed to be robust to vacuum tubes that did not follow specs.

Quite...more Despite the title, this book is not primarily about Alan Turing. It is really about the group of people at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton. Much of the book focuses on John von Neumann, who spearheaded the effort to build some of the earliest electronic computers. These first computers were very unreliable--incorrect results were as likely due to faulty vacuum tubes as coding errors. In fact, circuits had to be designed to be robust to vacuum tubes that did not follow specs.

Quite a large chunk of the book--and the most fascinating--dealt with the types of mathematical and physical problems that the earliest computers could solve. In fact, that was the principal interest of von Neumann--learning what types of problems could be solved using computers. Here, Alan Turing and Kurt Godel played a large role in defining what sorts of problems might be solvable.

Among the problems that the earliest computers attacked was weather forecasting. In the late 1940's, there was much controversy about the feasibility of numerically computing forecasts in principle. Of course, weathermen wanted to continue to use their gut feelings to forecast the weather, while some scientists thought that, given sufficient spatial resolution, the weather could be forecast far in advance. It was not until later that people like Lorenz discovered that there are fundamental limits to how far in advance weather can be forecast.

The earliest computers were also used for developing the atomic bomb. Many aspects of the physics were not solvable using direct means. Simulations using a brand new numerical method called "Monte Carlo" were extremely significant for solving them. For this method to work, random numbers are required for initiating independent simulated trajectories. But random numbers were not easy to come by, so a special program helped to develop algorithms for computing them.

This book goes into considerable depth, in describing the people who developed and used the first computers at the institute. There are fascinating descriptions of the mathematical, physics, and biological puzzles that were attempted. I recommend the book highly, for those interested in the history of numerical computation.

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Nov 06, 2012 Boris Limpopo rated it 5 of 5 stars

Dyson, George (2012). Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. New York: Pantheon. 2012. ISBN 9780307907066. Pagine 338. 10,99 €

Chi mi conosce o mi segue sa ormai che non mi entusiasmo troppo facilmente per un libro. Eppure questo lungo saggio di George Dyson merita un’acclamazione. È stato tradotto da poco da Codice edizioni (La cattedrale di Turing. Le origini dell’universo digitale) e quindi, se non volete fare la fatica di leggerlo in inglese, potete correre a leggerlo in ita...more

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Oct 25, 2012 Melinda rated it 5 of 5 stars

I thought this was an excellent book of huge scope and am frankly puzzled by some of the negative reviews on here - I also wrote code in the 70s but I am still in the field, not writing romance novels ... But anyway, the author brings alive the men and women (yes, there were women) who built the IAS machine to do hydrogen bomb calculations and what their lives were like. It shows us the nimble mind of the Hungarian Wunderkind John Von Neumann and the circle of people around him. It covers the va...more

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Aug 14, 2012 Jenny Brown rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book is fatally marred by Dyson's failure to understand computer architecture. I note many reviewers assuming that they are confused because they are math phobic. But I was a programmer in the late 1970s and 1980s. I wrote in Assembly language and have read machine language (in hex) when debugging, so when I read Dyson's long passages of gibberish purporting to describe what is going on in a computer I knew they were just plain gibberish.

The stories about the people involved in the project...more This book is fatally marred by Dyson's failure to understand computer architecture. I note many reviewers assuming that they are confused because they are math phobic. But I was a programmer in the late 1970s and 1980s. I wrote in Assembly language and have read machine language (in hex) when debugging, so when I read Dyson's long passages of gibberish purporting to describe what is going on in a computer I knew they were just plain gibberish.

The stories about the people involved in the project were very interesting, as was the description of the environment--the IAS--and its politics, but Dyson's failure to explain the most important technical concepts to the reader (or to understand them himself) limit the books usefulness. These concepts are not all that complex. They were explained to a class of recent high school graduates in Tennessee back when I took my first computer class in 1979 and we all wrote a simplified machine language program for our final exam. So there isn't any reason that the intelligent people this book was designed for couldn't have had the architecture of a Van Neumann machine explained in more depth--in a way that would have made sense to them.

I found this book saddening because it made me really want to understand the technology whose description it butchers. I'd really love to know more about how the engineers built these early computers and how they differ from the ones in use today. I gleaned many facts from the mishmash presented here, for example that CRTs were used in place of what was later called "core" memory in slightly later computers.

But Dyson clearly doesn't understand what a register is, nor does he understand why shifting bits would do arithmetic and reading the same bits in a CPU provides the machine with its program. For that matter, he doesn't seem to understand what a program is. A simple explanation of what a computer algorithm is and why 17 instructions can lead to thousands of operations being performed would make long tracts of this book make sense, which they currently don't.

But statements like one claiming that the CRT screen on a PC represented a CPU buffer were sheer imbecility. (The CPU on that computer functions as an output device, similar to the tape or punched paper on the early computers.) And there were dozens more of these uninformed statements.

Bottom line: If you read this book and are confused you are getting the authors message, since he, too, was terminally confused by the technology he was attempting to describe.
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Aug 04, 2012 Tony rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science

TURING’S CATHEDRAL. (2012). George Dyson. ****.
This is essentially a history of the Institute of Advanced Studies set up at Princeton, and of John von Neumann, the driving force behind its foundation and ultimate staffing. It was started during WW II, as an adjunct to the military’s effort to determine artillery trajectories using their fledgling computer. Princeton’s computer, however, was put to a diferent task – the development of the H-bomb. This was accomplished using their fledgling compu...more

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May 24, 2012 Christopher rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Ultimately, this is a very good book. The only thing keeping it from being a great book is the author's almost messianic fascination with the role cellular automata and its ilk played in the digital computing revolution, and the role the results of that revolution is playing in society.

I realize this might seem counterintuitive, but the religiosity that comes through in Dyson's meandering ruminations on the ramifications of the history he is recounting do not, in my opinion anyway, actually lend...more Ultimately, this is a very good book. The only thing keeping it from being a great book is the author's almost messianic fascination with the role cellular automata and its ilk played in the digital computing revolution, and the role the results of that revolution is playing in society.

I realize this might seem counterintuitive, but the religiosity that comes through in Dyson's meandering ruminations on the ramifications of the history he is recounting do not, in my opinion anyway, actually lend itself to a proper telling of this story.

That said, there is an awful lot to recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in computing, past, present, or future, or even for anyone who can appreciate the monumental engineering achievements Von Neumann's team enacted.

I am still awe struck by some of the hardships they endured and overcame - like the fact that solid state memory didn't exist at the time, so they had to use CRT tubes as stored memory - the instant between when electrons painted an image onto the surface of a CRT and the next when it faded before the next refresh were JUST enough to impart a zero or a one. That concept alone is mind boggling to me.

One area in which this book does an excellent job is exploring the incredible connections between the development of the stored matrix digital computer and that of the hydrogen bomb, charting a path for the reader through the tempestuous times, personalities and organizations that culminated in the successful detonation of one of the most fearsome weapons ever created by human kind.

On point I am very glad to have read this book. There were definite moments of frustration where I found myself wishing that Mr. Dyson would spend less time prostrate at the altar of digital life and more detailing the technical challenges involved, but the net result was still an incredibly rewarding experience.

I learned an enormous amount from this book, and that alone makes it priceless and really worth reading, even if it at times frustrated me :) (less)

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May 17, 2012 judy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, non-fiction

I stand in awe of the geniuses who envisioned and constructed the digital universe--largely because I haven't a prayer of understanding what they did. Although written in plain English, somehow my brain will simply not grasp the concepts. I suspect this comes from not only being math deficient but also math phobic too. If you don't have that problem, this is a weighty account of John von Neumann's group at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. The part that was easy for me was the academic r...more

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Mar 21, 2012 Espen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, technology

This is a tour de force history of the birth of the modern computer - and, specifically, the role of Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study in it - their "IAS machine" was a widely copied design, forming the basis for many research computers and IBM's early 701 model.We hear of John von Neumann (who tragically died of cancer at 53), Alan Turing (stripped of his security clearing and probably driven to suicide at 41), Stan Ulam, and many others, some famous, some (quite undeservedly) less so. I...more This is a tour de force history of the birth of the modern computer - and, specifically, the role of Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study in it - their "IAS machine" was a widely copied design, forming the basis for many research computers and IBM's early 701 model.We hear of John von Neumann (who tragically died of cancer at 53), Alan Turing (stripped of his security clearing and probably driven to suicide at 41), Stan Ulam, and many others, some famous, some (quite undeservedly) less so. I continue to be amazed at how far ahead some of the thinkers were - Alan Turing discussed multiprocessor and evolutionary approaches to artificial intelligence in 1946, for example.

On a side note, I was pleased to see that a number of Norwegian academics, mostly within meteorology, played an important part in the development and use of the IAS computer. Nils Aall Baricelli, an Italian-Norwegian, was someone I previously had not heard of, one of those thinkers who is way ahead of his time and (perhaps because he was independently wealthy and led a somewhat nomadic academic existence, hence may have been considered something of a dilettante, though Dyson certainly don't see him as such and credits him with the ability to see a possible way from programmed computer to independently learning mechanism (and, perhaps at some point, organism).

The book is a bit uneven - partly standard history, partly relatively deep computer science discussions (some of them certainly over my head), and partly - with no warning - brilliant leaps of extrapolating visioneering into both what computers have meant for us as a species and what they might mean in the future. It also shows some of the power struggles that take place in academics, and the important role IAS played in the development of the hydrogen bomb.

All in all, an excellent history of the early days of computing - a more recent history than many are aware of. As George Dyson says in his Ted lecture in 2003: "If these people hadn't done it, someone else would have. It was an idea whose time had come." That may be true, but it takes nothing away from the tremendous achievements of the early pioneers.(less)

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Feb 12, 2013 Eugene Miya rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: history-of-technology

This book is not an easy read for some. George does not write in a linear chronological narrative, but he does write from the unique perspective of a person who was present or near present to some of the figures at Princeton at the Institute for Advance Study (IAS). He basically paints a picture of life at the IAS.

I know first hand some of the sources Dyson touches upon. George has a tendency to chronologically jump back and forth on his subtopics, and this was a criticism I received from my Eng...more

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May 28, 2012 Ilya rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book covers essentially the same material as William Aspray's 1990 John von Neumann and the Origin of Modern Computing, the life and times of John von Neumann and the IAS computer. Aspray's book is much more to the point, though, while Dyson's takes large detours into the history of the atomic and hydrogen bomb, World War II cryptography and the like - all these topics have better books dedicated to them. George Dyson has a personal connection to the Institute of Advanced Study because his...more

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May 22, 2012 John Bickelhaupt rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book bent my mind. It is a history of the postwar evolution of computers and the development of the first truly digital machines. Much time is spent on the roles of John von Neumann and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in the process. Many scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project were involved as part of the justification for investment of government funding in computers was the need to model nuclear explosions to aid in the development of new weapons, especially the hydr...more

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Mar 09, 2012 Jorge rated it 3 of 5 stars

Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson

"Turing's Cathedral" is the uninspiring and rather dry book about the origins of the digital universe. With a title like, "Turing's Cathedral" I was expecting a riveting account about the heroic acts of Alan Turing the father of modern computer science and whose work was instrumental in breaking the wartime Enigma codes. Instead, I get a solid albeit "research-feeling" book about John von Neumann's project to construct Turing...more

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Jan 13, 2013 Margaret rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, biography-memoir, non-fiction

George Dyson's Turing's Cathedral summarizes the history of early computing, especially John von Neumann's involvement with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. While von Neumann was interested in and developed the basis of game theory, his major contribution to the modern world was his leadership of the IAS computing group during the mid-20th century. Shock front calculation to simulate the ignition of a hydrogen bomb was the problem that the first computers were built to solve, but t...more

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Dec 07, 2012 Andy rated it 3 of 5 stars

An interesting tour through the entwined development of the first electronic computers, nascent computer science, and the atomic bomb. It's always an awkward straddle to write about extremely technical innovation in a way that's comprehensible to the intelligent layman and in this book Mr. Dyson attempts to encompass, or at least encapsulate: nuclear physics, Goedel's completeness theorem, Turing's universal machine, digital logic, evolution, meteorology, and more. He seems to extrapolate from t...more

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Sep 23, 2012 Chris rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read this immediately after The Idea Factory, which is a similar history of Bell Labs (birthplace of the transistor, microwave communications, the cell phone, fibre optics, ...); if you're only going to read one book about research labs in New Jersey, read that one. This book should have been called "Von Neumann's Cathedral", given that Turing's at most a peripheral character in what is mostly a history of the Institute for Advanced Study and its residents, most specifically, Johnny von Neuman...more

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Jun 19, 2012 Christina rated it 3 of 5 stars

As a software engineer, I was excited to read Turing's Cathedral which is a comprehensive examination of the beginnings of the computer in the early to mid 20th Century and the digital universe. I was pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of accounts of the contributions made by women. While extensive research is apparent, I do not feel that the facts were organized logically. This is a history of computing but jumps from subject to subject, giving a history of each category and sub-category. Th...more

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Mar 08, 2013 Holly rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013-reads, some-recent-favorites, audio

Though I would never dare to participate in anything but a cursory, general conversation about Turing machines or Gödel's theorem or the Monte Carlo method, I just love histories of science and this book made me happy. I listened to the audio version, and often arcane concepts requiring visualization or anything involving equations would blow past me, but all the wonderful details and biographies and momentum more than made up for my muddled moments. I love that it started with a disorienting-or...more

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Jun 10, 2012 Steve rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Parts of this book are extremely good, and parts seems to be lost in a rambling recitations of the principal subjects' speculations on the digital universe they were creating. I read this book at the same time as I read "The Idea Factory" about Bell Labs, located only a few dozen miles away in New Jersey. It was enlightening to me to realize how very much New Jersey was the center of American innovation from the 1930s to the 1960s. This book focuses on the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princ...more

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Dec 28, 2012 Tom Lee rated it 4 of 5 stars

I keep this photo over my desk at work. I think it looks a bit like a microscopic close-up of a drop of milk, or maybe a bacterial colony. In fact it's a shot of the Trinity Test, the planet's first atomic detonation. To me, this event and the context surrounding it are the most fascinating and amazing chapter in all of human engineering: in a panicked fight against evil, a collection of human intelligence was assembled that, through sheer intellectual might, wielded abstract mathematics and app...more

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Jun 12, 2012 Greg Meyer rated it 5 of 5 stars

I had a few problems with this book. It was a little meandering at times. It had a bit of an odd structure, being organized by topic, rather than chronology -- which was especially odd because the first few chapters were in a chronological order. But, I think that the writing is excellent enough that it overcame these problems and ended up an excellent book.

His ability to describe very technical details is very good, though I occasionally had to go over passages a few times in order to understan...more I had a few problems with this book. It was a little meandering at times. It had a bit of an odd structure, being organized by topic, rather than chronology -- which was especially odd because the first few chapters were in a chronological order. But, I think that the writing is excellent enough that it overcame these problems and ended up an excellent book.

His ability to describe very technical details is very good, though I occasionally had to go over passages a few times in order to understand it. (It would have, actually, been a lot easier if I had realized that all of the pictures in the Kindle version are just at the back of the book. I would have looked at those a lot more.) And, his ability to convey the mystery, wonder and exuberance that everyone felt during those early days is amazing.

At times, this lead to a bit of a weakness, as the end of the book focused a little bit more on stranger, almost more mystical powers of computers. But, I think that these are very accurate visions of the future. Our world is largely shaped by computers, and our future will be influenced more and more by the intelligence and predictions of computers.

I am unable to comment on the morality or utility of these influences, nor in how they will play out in our future. In Frank Herbert's Dune, we saw a universe wherein a key commandment was, "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." While I doubt that Luddites shall be able to gain enough influence to bring this into fruition, I cannot rule out such a possibility, especially given some of the darker questions that Dyson asked towards the end of the book. This was one of Dyson's greatest strengths. He cannot see the future. However, he asks the questions that we all need to ask ourselves.

He not only asks, How will we accept the influence of machines in the future? But he tells us what these influences are, and asks us which of these we think are good and bad. Hopefully his more upbeat questions will come true, and computers will lead to a better world. I think they already have.(less)

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Apr 30, 2012 Vuk Trifkovic rated it 4 of 5 stars

Fascinating book. It is much needed social history / genealogy of computing based on IAS in Princeton. Yet, it is the social history bit that really attracted me to the book and that absolutely shines through. In some ways it's almost a real-life sequel to something like von Rezzori novel. The cast of all these odd and stray Mitteleuropa scientists is just fascinating.

It's just as fascinating to read about the very early computers and discover all these small design decisions that end up having...more

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Oct 02, 2012 Justin rated it 2 of 5 stars

I might easily have given this book four stars if Dyson could have stuck to history instead of indulging himself in inane speculations and endless commentaries. The connections he draws between completely unrelated aspects of technology and biology are so strained that whenever I read a particularly grievous one, I'm forced to put the book down and walk around the room until the waves of stupidity subside a bit. For example, at one point Dyson asks us to consider whether digital computers might...more I might easily have given this book four stars if Dyson could have stuck to history instead of indulging himself in inane speculations and endless commentaries. The connections he draws between completely unrelated aspects of technology and biology are so strained that whenever I read a particularly grievous one, I'm forced to put the book down and walk around the room until the waves of stupidity subside a bit. For example, at one point Dyson asks us to consider whether digital computers might be "optimizing our genetic code ... so we can better assist them." At another he explains the reason we can't predict the evolution of the digital universe is because algorithms that predicted airplane movements in WW2 had to be normalized to the reference frame of the target... or something? Throughout the entire book there's a complete disconnect between the technical nature of the things he describes and the vague abstractions that he twists into obscenely trite metaphors.
Dyson seems to live in some sort of science-fiction wonderland where every computer program is a kind of non-organic organism. He calls code "symbiotic associations of self-reproducing numbers" that "evolved into collector societies, bringing memory allocations and other resources back to the collective nest." They are active, autonomous entities which "learned how to divide into packets, traverse the network, correct any errors suffered along the way, and reassemble themselves at the other end." By the end of the book I'm not even sure if Dyson means this as a metaphor - he appears to genuinely believe that it's merely a matter of perspective.
The truth is, if every human died tomorrow and the internet was left to run from now to infinity, not a single advance would be made in the state of computing. The viruses would quickly burn themselves away, the servers would grind monotonously at their maintenance routines, and the Google webcrawlers would stoically trudge through every porn site on Earth, an infinite number of times.
Dyson might respond that programs integrate humans as a symbiotic part of their evolution, but in that case you could say the same thing about clothing, music, or furniture. In this light the IKEA franchise must be viewed as a great self-replicating organism, conscripting humans in the propagation of its global hegemony of coffee tables.(less)

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Jan 14, 2013 David Dinaburg rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I was surprised to see a dramatis personae in the opening of Turing’s Cathedral, but it is both apt and necessary. This is a dense character study of the dozens of mathematicians, engineers, and scientists that built the first electronic computing machine; the circumstances of their lives are detailed in lurid and occasionally ponderous detail. It is not a brisk read and it certainly takes some work to access. “Budapest, the city of bridges, produced a string of geniuses who bridged artistic and

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I was surprised to see a dramatis personae in the opening of Turing’s Cathedral, but it is both apt and necessary. This is a dense character study of the dozens of mathematicians, engineers, and scientists that built the first electronic computing machine; the circumstances of their lives are detailed in lurid and occasionally ponderous detail. It is not a brisk read and it certainly takes some work to access. “Budapest, the city of bridges, produced a string of geniuses who bridged artistic and scientific gaps.” I find this line so pedestrian it borders on insulting, blog fodder that an editor should have culled in the first round. I do not fault the writer, who was likely quite pleased; it falls into the seductive “too cute” territory—a witty rejoinder during a casual conversation, maybe, but a strained metaphor for a written page. I picture a publisher wearily sighing as he or she opts not to edit a math-centric author on this sophomoric literary faux pas.

But something happened about a hundred pages in; as I became used to the style, meeting each member of the cast, complete with detailing on how—and why—they came to Princeton radiated a sense of purpose. The pace is dictated by the nature of the material. These were some of the best and brightest of a generation; modernization as well as two world wars sent people from all over the globe to New Jersey. It give a sense that the subject requires a deep read, and if that sets a meandering pace, then so be it; the background of each player is required for comprehension of the how and why of our digital age. Sections and paragraphs and pages are devoted to minutia of travel or familial background:

The problem was how to squeeze displaced scholars into a shrinking job market without provoking the very anti-Semitism those scholars were trying to escape. The United States offered non-quota visas to teachers and professors, but with insufficient openings for American candidates, finding positions for the refugees, especially in Princeton, was a difficult sell. An invitations to the Institute for Advanced Study allowed Princeton University, historically resistant to Jewish students and faculty, to reap the benefits of the refugee scientists without incurring any of the associated costs. The arrival of Einstein helped open the door. Princeton had become one of the more conservative enclaves in the United States, “a quaint and ceremonious little village of puny demigods on stilts,” as Einstein described it to the Queen of Belgium in 1933.

What you get, then, is not a book about the creation of digital computers, but a book about the people who happened to create computers.

Gödel proved that within any formal system sufficiently powerful to include ordinary arithmetic, there will always be undecidable statements that cannot be proved true, yet cannot be proved false. Turing proved that within any formal (or mechanical) system, not only are there functions that can be given a finite description yet cannot be computed by any finite machine in a finite amount of time, but there is no definite method to distinguish computable from noncomputable functions in advance. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, as Leibniz suggested, we appear to live in the best of all possible worlds, where the computable functions make life predictable enough to be survivable, while the noncomputable functions make life (and mathematical truth) unpredictable enough to remain interesting, no matter how far computers continue to advance.

The mathematical theories are still prevalent, and you will pick up bits of atomic age etymology, like how a “flip-flop” became a “toggle.” “'Flip-flop' is not the right word for a bi-stable circuit which stays in whatever state you put it in. 'Toggle' constituted a far more secure representation of binary data than an element whose state is represented by simply being on or off—where failure is indistinguishable from one of the operational states.” Turing's Cathedral is the genesis chapter of the electronic computer bible, written now before apocrypha finds a way to alter the message. A message that computers, however they may be used now, were born of warfare:

The behavior of both high-explosive detonations and supersonic projectiles depended on the effects of shock waves whose behavior was nonlinear and poorly understood. What happens when a discontinuity is propagated faster than the local speed of information ahead of the disturbance (for pressure waves, this being the speed of sound)? What happens when two (or more) shockwaves collide?

Von Neumann’s theory of reflected shock waves could then be used to maximize a bomb’s effects. “If you had an explosion a little above the ground and you wanted to know how the original wave would hit the ground, form a reflected wave, then combine near the ground with the original wave, and have an extra strong blast wave go out near the ground, that was a problem involving highly non-linear hydrodynamics,” recalls Martin Schwarzschild.

Dozens of human computers—people with paper, pencil, and patience—would have to work for hundreds of hours to complete the math required for shock wave analysis and bomb anticipation. Anti-aircraft guns, during World War Two, required a gunner to estimate how far to lead and when to light the shell before firing. They were not very accurate. Mathematical tables were brought in; creating the tables took time. Non-human computers made this work practical. It also opened the door, down the road, to the creation of weapons so powerful they defied then-current imagining:

After the Soviet explosion of a nuclear weapon on August 29, 1949, the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission was asked for their opinion on whether the United States should undertake the development of the hydrogen bomb. The answer was no. “It is not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes,” Oppenheimer explained in the introduction to the committee’s report. “Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations. We all hope that by one means or another, the development of these weapons can be avoided.”

“Its use would involve a decision to slaughter a vast number of civilians,” the majority, including James Conant as well as Oppenheimer, concurred. “We believe that the psychological effect of the weapon in our hands would be adverse to our interest…. In determining not to proceed to develop the Super bomb, we see a unique opportunity of providing by example some limitations on the totality of war and thus of limiting the fear and arousing the hopes of mankind.”

Before the terrifying spectacles at Bikini Atoll were made possible, electronic computers had to be up to the task.

If we devote in this manner several years to experimentation with such a machine, without a need for immediate applications, we shall be much better off at the end of that period in every respect, including the applications. The importance of accelerating, approximating, and computing mathematics by factors like 10,000 or more, lies not only in that one might thereby do in 10,000 times less time problems which one is now doing, or say 100 times more of them in 100 times less time—but rather that one will be able to handle problems which are considered completely unassailable at present.

That is a quote from John von Neumann, who “...left Europe with an unforgiving hatred for the Nazis, a growing distrust of the Russians, and a determination never again to let the free world fall into a position of military weakness that would force the compromises that had been made with Hitler while the German war machine was gaining strength." He was the driving force behind the digital computing age and a staunch advocate for using the power of computers for weapons testing. Without his ability to secure funding and allow mathematicians and engineers space for creative and non-practical experimentation—all while still providing classified government sponsors usable and politically leveragable wartime and "preventative" weapon capabilities—electronic computers and our current information age would likely have been stymied for decades or denied outright.

Yet even during the darkness of World War Two, the newfound precision that computing power allowed was not used solely for destruction:

While von Neumann was looking for targets that should be bombed, the Institute’s humanists were enlisted (by the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas) to help identify targets that should not be bombed. Erwin Panofsky, the art historian, was responsible for identifying culturally important resources in Germany, while the Institute’s classicists and archaeologists helped supply similar intelligence for the Mediterranean and Middle East. Even Einstein was debriefed.

It is in these small details rather than the breathtaking scope of world-altering events that elucidate just how much research and effort went into Turing’s Cathedral. Bits and quotes from the major players are dropped liberally throughout the text so the reader can create their own unadulterated view and not be forced into the image of events as seen through the lens of the narrator. "The ENIAC was limited by storage, not by speed. 'Imagine that you take 20 people, lock them up in a room for 3 years, provide them with 20 desk multipliers, and institute this rule: during the entire proceedings all of them together may never have more than one page written full,' von Neumann observed. 'They can erase any amount, put it back again, but they are entitled at any given time only to one page. It’s clear where the bottleneck…lies.'" It is beneficial that the author has familial ties to the time and places being discussed, and a reader gets the feeling he is transcribing events as near to accurate as we who were not there are likely to get.

As time marches forward and electronic computers become ubiquitous, it borders on the imperative to understand how and who created the expanding digital universe:

In the real world, most of the time, finding an answer is easier than defining the question. It is easier to draw something that looks like a cat than to define what, exactly, makes something look like a cat. A child scribbles indiscriminately, and eventually something appears that resembles a cat. An answer finds a question, not the other way around. The world starts to make sense, and the meaningless scribbles (the unused neural connections) are left behind. “I agree with you about ‘thinking in analogies,’ but I do not think of the brain as ‘searching for analogies’ so much as having analogies forced upon it by its own limitations,” Turing wrote in 1948.

Turing’s Cathedral imparts a near-biblical understanding of the dawn of the Information Age. "The information in our genes turned out to be more digital, more sequential, and more logical than expected, and the information in our brains turned out to be less digital, less sequential, and less logical than expected." Computers and humanity have become symbiotically intertwined and both sides grow more similar as they take cues from each other:

Search engines and social networks are analog computers of unprecedented scale. Information is being encoded (and operated upon) as continuous (and noise-tolerant) variables such as frequencies (of connection or occurrence) and the topology of what connects where, with location being increasingly defined by a fault-tolerant template rather than by an unforgiving numerical address. Pulse-frequency coding for the Internet is one way to describe the working architecture of a search engine, and PageRank for neurons is one way to describe the working architecture of the brain. These computational structures use digital components, but the analog computing being performed by the systems as a whole exceeds the complexity if the digital code on which it runs.

It is difficult to keep the obvious truth—that computers were recently created by people—in plain view. George Dyson is Hesiod for the Prometheus tale of the men and women of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Access to accurate documentation of a creation myth—the origin of electronic computers, technology as simultaneously useful and dangerous as fire—makes Turing’s Cathedral a strong recommendation for anyone.(less)

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Apr 16, 2013 Dan Downing rated it 5 of 5 stars

Background: Alan Turing was a British mathematician who outlined the possibility and architecture of a Universal machine---in 1936. He also made what can be described as war winning contributions to coding and cryptography during WWII (being awarded the Order of the British Empire --secretly); significant contributions to other areas of mathematics and science and computer building, until 1954 when he was either killed by British agents or committed suicide, either alternative a result of being...more

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Feb 23, 2013 Kurtbg rated it 3 of 5 stars

A historical look at the development of the computer as it rose out of the ashes of the concept of "Human Computers" in world war II and the need for higher computing power in the development and testing of the atomic bomb used in WWII.
In it is the rise and proliferation of John von Neumann, and the creation of an institute for a non-teaching academic think tank in the spirit of those found in the early 20th century in east Europe. Thus, the Institute of Advance Study in Princeton New Jersey was...more

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Feb 02, 2013 JDK1962 rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: abandoned

Abandoned on p. 91, about 1/4 of the way through. As a software engineer by trade, I'm very interested in the topic, but this book was massively disappointing. It wandered around, occasionally pulling in material of no interest whatsoever (Chapter 2, "Olden Farm" covers the Revolutionary War [!] history of the area that the IAS would inhabit ~150 years later. I really--really--couldn't give a rat's ass, and I'm mystified as to why the author thought it in any way significant, other than as a mea...more

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