Turing (A Novel about Computation)

by Christos H. Papadimitriou

Overview

The world of computation according to Turing, an interactive tutoring program, as told to star-crossed lovers: a novel.

Our hero is Turing, an interactive tutoring program and namesake (or virtual emanation?) of Alan Turing, World War II code breaker and father of computer science. In this unusual novel, Turing's idiosyncratic version of intellectual history from a computational point of view unfolds in tandem with the story of a love affair involving Ethel, a successful computer executive, Alexandros, a melancholy archaeologist, and Ian, a charismatic hacker. After Ethel (who shares her first name with Alan Turing's mother) abandons Alexandros following a sundrenched idyll on Corfu, Turing appears on Alexandros's computer screen to unfurl a tutorial on the history of ideas. He begins with the philosopher-mathematicians of ancient Greece—"discourse, dialogue, argument, proof. . . can only thrive in an egalitarian society"—and the Arab scholar in ninth-century Baghdad who invented algorithms; he moves on to many other topics, including cryptography and artificial intelligence, even economics and developmental biology. (These lessons are later critiqued amusingly and developed further in postings by a fictional newsgroup in the book's afterword. ) As Turing's lectures progress, the lives of Alexandros, Ethel, and Ian converge in dramatic fashion, and the story takes us from Corfu to Hong Kong, from Athens to San Francisco—and of course to the Internet, the disruptive technological and social force that emerges as the main locale and protagonist of the novel.

Alternately pedagogical and romantic, Turing (A Novel about Computation) should appeal both to students and professionals who want a clear and entertaining account of the development of computation and to the general reader who enjoys novels of ideas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262661911
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	02/11/2005
Series:	The MIT Press
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.44(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Christos H. Papadimitriou is C. Lester Hogan Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of many books on computational theory.

What People are Saying About This

Apostolos Doxiadis

Combining storytelling and brilliant exposition in the Enlightenment tradition, Christos Papadimitriou's Turing is at once a moving postmodern love story and one of the best introductions to theoretical computer science available, an enchanting offer to the intelligent reader.

Manuel Castells

This is a delightful book in which science and fiction meet literature and politics. It makes you feel and understand what creativitiy means and how it relates to the culture of society. And it is great fun!

Donald E. Knuth

Turing sets new standards for the popular exposition of computer science. It is also a very funny book.

Endorsement

Turing sets new standards for the popular exposition of computer science. It is also a very funny book.

—Donald E. Knuth, Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming, Stanford University

From the Publisher

Combining storytelling and brilliant exposition in the Enlightenment tradition, Christos Papadimitriou's Turing is at once a moving postmodern love story and one of the best introductions to theoretical computer science available, an enchanting offer to the intelligent reader.

—Apostolos Doxiadis, author of Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture

This is a delightful book in which science and fiction meet literature and politics. It makes you feel and understand what creativitiy means and how it relates to the culture of society. And it is great fun!

—Manuel Castells, Wallis Annenberg Professor of Communication Technology & Society, University of Southern California, Author of The Internet Galaxy

Turing sets new standards for the popular exposition of computer science. It is also a very funny book.

—Donald E. Knuth, Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming, Stanford University

Editorial Reviews

...inventively interwoven with a romance and intellectual mystery.—Sally Abbott , San Francisco Chronicle—

What's most delightful about Turing is the charmed glow that Papadimitriou's prose sheds all around.

—George Scialabba, Boston Sunday Globe—

From the Publisher

What's most delightful about Turing is the charmed glow that Papadimitriou's prose sheds all around.

—George Scialabba, Boston Sunday Globe

Reviews

What's most delightful about Turing is the charmed glow that Papadimitriou's prose sheds all around.

Boston Sunday Globe - George Scialabba

...inventively interwoven with a romance and intellectual mystery.

San Francisco Chronicle - Sally Abbott

The "novel" part of this ungainly novel of ideas explores a love triangle connecting software executive Ethel, aging but unreliable archeologist Alexandros (who annoys Ethel by ogling topless women at the beach) and outlaw hacker Ian (with whom Ethel enjoys a torrid virtual-reality affair). The "ideas" part comes in the "person" of Turing, an artificial intelligence program (modeled on computer scientist Alan Turing) that pops up unbidden on PC monitors to deliver a lengthy bits-to-browsers computer tutorial, with lectures thrown in on such topics as intellectual history, cryptography and non-Euclidean geometry. Turing's disquisitions are aimed mostly at Alexandros, a disillusioned leftist slowly coming to embrace the modern cyberworld. Through them, computer scientist Papadimitriou-choosing pedagogy over plot-imparts a humanist gloss to the libertarian futurism of the techno-elite, instructing readers that the free market is the mathematically optimal social arrangement, that the Internet and encryption software are bulwarks of freedom against a useless but heavy-handed state and that the human adventure-indeed, life itself-is coterminous with machine computation. Unfortunately, formatting these ideas as stilted dialogue ("So, Alexandros, did you understand this new way of categorizing adjectives?") makes it less, not more, engaging. Still worse is the love story, whose wooden offerings ("I will never stop loving you.... I know I'll love you after our F2F") seem designed chiefly to reassure readers that, even as cyberspace replaces sexual identity with "seamlessly erotic interface code" as the basis for romance, old saws about soul mates and commitment issues survive. Tech freaks and computer whizzes may love Turing's musings, but mainstream readers won't have patience for all the theory. (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

The sort of thing you might expect from MIT: a computer science professor’s attempt to turn his specialty into fiction. Papadimitriou (Computer Science/Berkeley) sets his story in the near future and tells it in the present tense. It features three main human characters and one nonhuman. Ethel is the inventor of the relevance engine Exegesis, a program that determines what value objects turned up by a Web search have to the individual user. Alexandros is a Greek archaeologist working with a computerlike artifact recovered from a ship that sank some two thousand years earlier. And Ian is an outlaw programmer, a charismatic hacker with whom Ethel takes up residence after the affair with Alexandros that opens the story. The nonhuman character is Turing, an advanced interactive program (named for Alan Turing, a pioneer of computing) that comes to Alexandros’ screen to instruct him (and occasionally his teenaged daughter) in the history and philosophical implications of computer science. The effect of all this depends largely on what the reader comes looking for. Judged as fiction, Turing is distinctly short on plot and not much fuller in its people. On a visit to a Greek island, Ethel falls in love with Alexandros, gets pregnant, leaves him, visits an advanced virtual-reality scenario where she meets Ian, falls in love with him, then he comes to join her in America . . . and so on. Papadimitriou seems only vaguely interested in the effect of these events on the characters; in fact, the narrative is most alive when Turing is online with Alexandros, feeding him computer science, math, and philosophy in a breezy, not entirely reverent tone. The final thirty-odd pages are comments—oftenquite funny—on the text by readers of an imaginary newsgroup. Still, as with other instructional novels, this odd hybrid is likely to annoy as many as it entertains.

Kirkus Reviews