Let me get the storyline of this book out of the way quickly, so that we can get to the stronger parts of this “novel.” Girl meets boy, falls in love (?), has sex, runs away back to her true lover, her true lover dies... You can guess the rest. The girl is Ethel, a smart computer scientist who has come up with an intelligent search engine; the boy is Alexandros, an archaeologist; and the lover is Ian Frost, hacker (“runner”) extraordinaire.

Before running away, Ethel introduces Alexandros to Turing, an artificially intelligent program whose uniform resource locator (URL) points to a server in Kazakhstan, but who roams around the Net freely and decides unilaterally whom to assist. When Ethel abandons Alexandros, Turing decides to step in, and tutors Alexandros on various aspects of computing. What follows are lengthy but entertaining monologues on the basics of computing. Turing covers a wide range of topics, including semiconductors, bits, operating systems, networks, Eulerian cycles, complexity theory leading to polynomial (P) versus nondeterministic polynomial (NP), cryptography, artificial intelligence, and much more. Most of the lessons revolve around work done by Alan Turing, generally considered to be the founder of computer science. While Papadimitriou does a great job with the lessons, not surprising since he is a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, the fictional narrative that intertwines it comes across as clichéd and awkward.

The few pages that really deal with the story and not the lessons just aren’t enough to develop the characters fully, and the novel doesn’t really realize its full potential. Papadimitriou tries, in the latter part of the book, to bring in the personal story of Alan Turing (mainly his prosecution at the hands of the authorities), but again fails to deliver much on this subject. Where he does deliver is in the engaging discourses of Turing the program. By making the character of Alexandros a novice at computer science, Papadimitriou provides a great way to start from the basics to eventually tackle complex issues like complexity, P=NP?, and so on. Papadimitriou uses an interesting tool to explore some of the lesson points in detail: references to postings by “readers” of Turing in a nonexistent newsgroup, which at times contradict some of the less factual matters of the discourse, and which sometimes provide a more thorough examination of topics like NP. Do not skip these references, as they do provide some interesting things to ponder, like Euclid-Mullin numbers and the conspiracy angle to the use of the data encryption standard (DES) for encryption.

With this book, Papadimitriou has tried to pull off a mini Sophie’s world [1] for computing. Though successful in the pedagogical context, this book fails to make much of an impact with its storyline.