Turing (A Novel About Computation)

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by Christos H. Papadimitriou

MIT Press

Due/Published November 2003, 208 pages, cloth

ISBN 0262162180

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.

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

"Turing sets new standards for the popular exposition of computer science. It is also a very funny book." -- Donald E. Knuth