The Annotated Turing A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine
Auteur : Petzold Charles
Mathematician Alan Turing invented an imaginary computer known as the Turing Machine; in an age before computers, he explored the concept of what it meant to be computable, creating the field of computability theory in the process, a foundation of present-day computer programming.
The book expands Turing?s original 36-page paper with additional background chapters and extensive annotations; the author elaborates on and clarifies many of Turing?s statements, making the original difficult-to-read document accessible to present day programmers, computer science majors, math geeks, and others.
Interwoven into the narrative are the highlights of Turing?s own life: his years at Cambridge and Princeton, his secret work in cryptanalysis during World War II, his involvement in seminal computer projects, his speculations about artificial intelligence, his arrest and prosecution for the crime of "gross indecency," and his early death by apparent suicide at the age of 41.
Introduction vii
I Foundations 1
1 This Tomb Holds Diophantus 3
2 The Irrational and the Transcendental 13
3 Centuries of Progress 35
II Computable Numbers 55
4 The Education of Alan Turing 57
5 Machines at Work 79
6 Addition and Multiplication 97
7 Also Known as Subroutines 111
8 Everything Is a Number 127
9 The Universal Machine 143
10 Computers and Computability 163
11 Of Machines and Men 189
III Das Entscheidungsproblem 199
12 Logic and Computability 201
13 Computable Functions 231
14 The Major Proof 259
15 The Lambda Calculus 281
16 Conceiving the Continuum 299
IV And Beyond 323
17 Is Everything a Turing Machine? 325
18 The Long Sleep of Diophantus 351
Selected Bibliography 361
Index 366
American writer Charles Petzold (1953–) is the author of the acclaimed 1999 book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, a unique exploration into the digital technologies of computers. He is also the author of hundreds of articles about computer programming, as well as several books on writing programs that run under Microsoft Windows. His Web site is www.charlespetzold.com.
Date de parution : 06-2008
Ouvrage de 384 p.
15x22.4 cm
Thème de The Annotated Turing :
Mots-clés :
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