The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine
by C. Petzold
book data
14 ratings,
4.14
average rating, 5 reviews
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published
June 16th 2008
by Wiley
binding
Paperback, 300 pages
isbn
0470229055
(isbn13: 9780470229057)
description
This book presents Turing’s original 36-page paper and a follow-up 3-page correction with background chapters and extensive annotations. Mathematical ...more
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avg 4.14
editions: all | this edition
editions: all | this edition
Wouldn't you like to know the outcome of your actions before you decide what to do? Looking into the future, you could see if biting that apple was a good idea or something completely different and unexpected.
However, there's no way through it but to do it.
Well mathematicians and computer programmers have the same problem. British mathematician, Alan Turing, proved that there is no way a computer can be designed with the correct set of instructions (program) so as to be ...more
However, there's no way through it but to do it.
Well mathematicians and computer programmers have the same problem. British mathematician, Alan Turing, proved that there is no way a computer can be designed with the correct set of instructions (program) so as to be ...more
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Read in November, 2008
Amazon 2008-10-24. This book needed to decide earlier on whether it was going to be pop-CS or a real book. There's some great insights here -- I finally feel that I truly know the difference now, in a deep sense, of what makes a given transcendental number computable or not (there's unfortunately rather little detail on computable functions themselves, but that's an easy extension from computable numbers). Kudos to Petzold for his fine background material on Hilbert's erweiterte Funktionenkalkul...more
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So far (7 Dec 02008) I've finished the introduction and have started in on the meat - Turing's paper itself. The first few chapters were great - basically, a quick recap of algebra and set theory. I'll update once I finish - I kinda got sidetracked into reading Cryptonomicon (I've owned it since 01999 but never got around to reading it).
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Read in October, 2008
This is a wonderful book. Petzold does a line by line exegesis of Turing's 1936 paper on computability, explaining the historical and mathematical background, and showing illustrative examples. The book is probably most interesting to computer programmers, but would also be of interest to anyone interested in mathematics or the history of computer technology. Having attempted to read Turing's paper several years ago, I found that this book really closed my gaps in understanding.
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Has a copy to sell/swap
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Read in July, 2008
A must read for every computer scientist.
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