Review of the Annotated Turing
Wed Jan 28 2009
A review of “The Annotated Turing”, Charles Petzold, Wiley Publishing Inc., 2008. ISBN: 978-0-470-22905-7
It is a great book. A real pleasure to read. Why? Because it is interesting material, presented in ways not encountered before, entertaining, and understandable. It is much more than an annotation of Turing’s paper. It is an overview of the fundamentals of computation, using Turing’s paper as a vehicle.
This book is in stark contrast with other books about computing. This book puts computing back on the map.
Think about the X for dummies, X in 30 days, X in action and so on. These books always cover a single language or a single framework, they are always at least 600 pages long, and the first 300 pages are always about the almighty greatness of X, flexible, extensible, reusable, and so on. I always want to shout it out: “show me the stuff, and I will make my own conclusions”. The information in these books is so thin that you have to go searching for some information. These are always aimed at “the average programmer”, “the starter”, you don’t have to know anything in advance. The books are often an insult to knowledgeable and skillful readers. These are throwaway-books, obsolete when they arrive in the stores.
The Annotated Turing is approx. 350 pages long, it is full of information, it explains the fundamentals and limitations of computation in general. On almost every page there is information I never read before in such a way. This book is timeless, it will always remain actual because it is about the fundamentals. It is amazing how much truth can be communicated in relatively few pages, it is not even dense, it is a relief compared to most of the recent computing books.
Some things that struck me personally:
- The history of Number Theory, the search for rational numbers, algebraic numbers and transcendental numbers. The fact that computational numbers overlap with both algebraic and transcendental numbers, but not completely.
- The relation between the theories of Cantor, Hilbert, Russel, Gödel, Turing and Church. This is the first time I have seen the relation of their work, the historical perspective of it all. The overlap between their work. The victories and the dramas.
- The bizarre concept of “real numbers” we think we know these, but we don’t know them at all.
- I never quite understood why “lambda calculus” was called that way and why it was formulated this way. When I read the paragraph, I had a “AHA” moment. The book is full of these kinds of information.
I am really waiting for Petzold to write a more of these books. Maybe “Gödel’s theorem” or other interesting stuff.
blog comments powered by Disqus