Computing Reviews
Today's Issue Hot Topics Search Browse Recommended My Account Log In
Review Help
Search
Turing’s revolution : the impact of his ideas about computability
Sommaruga G., Strahm T., Birkhäuser Basel, New York, NY, 2016. 329 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319221-55-7)
Date Reviewed: Aug 23 2016

In his famous 1936 paper, Alan Turing solved an outstanding problem in mathematics--“What is an algorithm?”--and laid out the (theoretical) basis for the development of digital computers and programming languages that were developed in the subsequent decades.

This volume consists of 12 papers from a symposium held in Zurich to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Turing’s birth. The authors are all distinguished scholars. They include some of the “grand old men” of computability such as Martin Davis, Solomon Feferman, and Robert Soare.

As one might expect, there is some history. Copeland and Sommaruga trace the development of real computers based on Turing’s ideas about the universal stored program computer. Part of their paper is a refutation of Hurd’s claim that the idea of a “stored program computer” is not useful in discussing the history of computing.

Somewhat surprisingly, there is still controversy about “exactly” what Turing did. Did he simply claim that his construct captured the informal idea of an algorithm? Is the equivalence between Turing machines and algorithms a “thesis” that needs to be constantly reexamined? Did Turing prove a “theorem”? Did he discover the “right” definition of “algorithm”? Five of this book’s papers take up these questions and demonstrate that depending on one’s philosophical perspectives, a variety of answers to these questions is possible.

The remaining papers start with Turing’s analysis of computation over the natural numbers and ask if there are ways to extend “computation” to deal with other structures. For example, if you are interested in computation over the real numbers, should you take an approach based on approximating rational sequences that can be dealt with in the framework of Turing machines, or should you posit a new algebraic framework for computation? These papers present a variety of different approaches to defining computation over other structures. At this time, this is still an active research area with no clear conclusions. May we hope that some future Turing will bring clarity and discover the “right” way to describe generalized computations.

In the end, this book will be a disappointment if you were expecting to learn more about Alan Turing, but if you are interested in philosophical questions or you want to know what questions about “computation” are still open, you’ll enjoy this book.

Reviewer:  Paul Cull Review #: CR144705 (1611-0778)
Bookmark and Share
  Reviewer Selected
 
 
Models Of Computation (F.1.1 )
 
 
Alan Turing (K.2 ... )
 
 
History of Computing (K.2 )
 
Would you recommend this review?
yes
no
Other reviews under "Models Of Computation": Date
Brains, machines, and mathematics (2nd ed.)
Arbib M., Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., New York, NY, 1987. Type: Book (9789780387965390)
Sep 1 1988
Communication and concurrency
Milner R., Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1989. Type: Book (9780131150072)
Jan 1 1990
The social metaphor for distributed processing
Stark W., Kotin L. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 7(1): 125-147, 1989. Type: Article
Dec 1 1990
more...

E-Mail This Printer-Friendly
Send Your Comments
Contact Us
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.   Copyright 1999-2024 ThinkLoud®
Terms of Use
| Privacy Policy