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Cover Quote: June 2013

By that time, many of us had realized that computer science is no longer about the computer: The Internet (by which I mean both the network of networks and the application networks running on it) had become by far the most important computational artifact of our times, certainly the most fascinating and worthy of scientific scrutiny. And for me the Internet is Alan Turing’s ultimate creation. That our universe is now computational is a direct consequence of Turing’s universal machine. Let me explain.

It was fortunate that Turing had created not just his machine, but also its famous universal model. One can wonder why, among the other creators of computational models of his time, he bothered to reach for universality. Perhaps he foresaw software. More likely, he sought a programming exercise worthy of his acumen (don’t many programmers in our time come of age through writing a compiler?)[.] By making his universal machine so compelling and graphic, he planted universality into von Neumann’s head, and ultimately into the computers as they came to be.



- Christos H. Papadimitriou
Alan and I, 2012
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