Computing Reviews
Today's Issue Hot Topics Search Browse Recommended My Account Log In
Review Help
Search
Philosophical explorations of the legacy of Alan Turing : Turing 100
Floyd J., Bokulich A., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2017. 361 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319532-78-3)
Date Reviewed: Dec 20 2017

Alan Turing has become such a cultural icon (with a major Hollywood biopic ensuring that even your average moviegoer is reasonably conversant with his name) that it is hard to think of a time when this wasn’t the case. And yet less than three decades ago, when I first encountered Andrew Hodges’ biography of Turing [1] in the local British Council library, I recall myself marveling that someone would write such a massive biography about “the guy whose name is associated with that machine that’s there in all the computer science books” (as one of my friends put it). Curious as to what the book had to say about Turing, I borrowed it and spent the next few weeks being (in turn) astounded by his genius as a mathematician/logician/cryptographer, fascinated by his prescient contributions to artificial intelligence (AI) and pattern formation, and finally indignant at how state persecution finally led to his untimely death. By the time I finished the book, this tragic figure had become one of my intellectual heroes (and remains one to this day). While Hodges’ excellent book had woken the world to the fact that Turing was much more than just someone who had lent his name to a theoretical concept in computer science, it was (as it turned out) just the beginning of what has by now become a veritable deluge of books, papers, and conference proceedings that aim to either bring to light one or more hitherto unknown contributions of Turing or to discuss how his contributions have shaped recent developments in any number of areas. With such a large amount of information about Turing already available in print, one can ask what new contribution one more book on Turing can make.

The proceedings volume of the Turing 100 Colloquium at the University of Boston, in 2012, edited by Juliet Floyd and Alisa Bokulich, tries to break new ground in Turing studies by focusing on the more philosophical aspects of Turing’s scientific legacy. Of course, the contributions of Turing as a philosopher are not entirely unexplored--Hodges himself wrote a short book on Turing as a philosopher in 1997 [2]. And yet, it is a relatively little explored terrain that has the promise to reveal new insights into Turing’s contributions. The book begins with a highly readable introduction to its contents, written by Floyd, that not only summarizes each of the papers contained in it but also puts them in context, occasionally doing it much better than the papers themselves. The book thematically divides the 15 papers equally into three parts, the first focusing on the foundations of mathematics and logic, the second on computation and computers, and the third on the possibility of simulating mind with machine.

Needless to say in a collection of this kind, there is significant heterogeneity in the quality of the papers. The second part, which I turned to first, interested to see how the authors explore the philosophical issues of computing and computers, turned out to be rather out of place given the theme of the volume. The two papers I enjoyed reading most in this section are both technological histories--one by the well-known Turing scholar B. Jack Copeland and Jason Long on the creation of computer-generated music by Turing (which contains a fascinating account of the “digital archaeology” by which the authors reconstructed the codes used to play the computer music recorded by the BBC in 1951) and the other by Craig Bauer on the history of voice encryption, focusing on Turing’s work on SIGSALY. While readers with an interest in the history of computers and digital communication will undoubtedly find both papers of interest, no explicit philosophical issues are discussed here. The remaining three papers, while trying to be more overtly “philosophical,” are rather disappointing. I think this is a wasted opportunity, as I was expecting at least one of the authors to meditate on the connection between dynamics and computation, and weigh in on speculations about whether the universe is in fact a vast computing machine [3].

The other two parts, by contrast, deliver the goods.

The third part begins with an essay by Patrick Henry Winston, a figure well known in classical AI, whose title alludes to Turing’s famous 1950 paper that gave us the Turing test. Winston meditates on the decades of work done on coming up with a machine that could win the imitation game, and decides that our “story understanding” ability is what sets us apart. It is interesting to read, but one can’t help but wonder that it is precisely this kind of subjective belief by a scientist that “X” or “Y” is what intelligence is, that made Turing come up with the imitation game in the first place.

The first part has essays that are equally good, but my personal favorite is the lengthy meditation by Juliet Floyd on how Wittgenstein influenced Turing’s approach to the foundation of logic, particularly on the notion of “commonsense.” This paper, more than any other, justifies the title of the volume as it tries to show that it is difficult to appreciate Turing the mathematician unless we accept him equally as a philosopher--possibly as great as Wittgenstein--concerned with the nature of logic.

Reviewer:  Sitabhra Sinha Review #: CR145722 (1802-0065)
1) Hodges, A. Alan Turing: the enigma. Burnett Books, London, UK, 1983.
2) Hodges, A. Turing: a natural philosopher. Phoenix, London, UK, 1997.
3) Zenil, H. A computable universe: understanding and exploring nature as computation. World Scientific, Singapore, 2012.
Bookmark and Share
  Reviewer Selected
 
 
Alan Turing (K.2 ... )
 
 
Alan Turing (A.0 ... )
 
 
Philosophical Foundations (I.2.0 ... )
 
Would you recommend this review?
yes
no
Other reviews under "Alan Turing": Date
Mechanical intelligence (collected works of A. M. Turing)
Ince D. (ed), North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1992. Type: Book (9780444880581)
Aug 1 1993
Pure mathematics (collected works of A. M. Turing)
Britton J. (ed), North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1992. Type: Book (9780444880598)
Feb 1 1993
Alan M. Turing: centenary edition
Turing S., Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2012.  194, Type: Book (978-1-107020-58-0), Reviews: (1 of 2)
Aug 22 2012
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