Turing

(A Novel about Computation)

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by Christos H. Papadimitriou

MIT Press

Due/Published April 2005, 208 pages, paper

ISBN 0262661918

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 lan, a charismatic hacker. After Ethel (who shares her first name with Alan Turing's mother) abandons Alexandros following a sun drenched 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 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 lan 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.