Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Turing: (A Novel about Computation)

Turing: (A Novel about Computation)

Papadimitriou, Christos H.

Paperback

RomanceScience FictionGeneral Fiction

ISBN10: 0262661918
ISBN13: 9780262661911
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: Feb 11 2005
Pages: 284
Weight: 0.81
Height: 0.64 Width: 6.82 Depth: 7.92
Language: English
The world of computation according to Turing, an interactive tutoring program, as told to star-crossed lovers: a novel.

Our hero is Turing, an interactive tutoring program and namesake (or virtual emanation?) of Alan Turing, World War II code breaker and father of computer science. In this unusual novel, Turing's idiosyncratic version of intellectual history from a computational point of view unfolds in tandem with the story of a love affair involving Ethel, a successful computer executive, Alexandros, a melancholy archaeologist, and Ian, a charismatic hacker. After Ethel (who shares her first name with Alan Turing's mother) abandons Alexandros following a sundrenched idyll on Corfu, Turing appears on Alexandros's computer screen to unfurl a tutorial on the history of ideas. He begins with the philosopher-mathematicians of ancient Greece--discourse, dialogue, argument, proof... can only thrive in an egalitarian society--and the Arab scholar in ninth-century Baghdad who invented algorithms; he moves on to many other topics, including cryptography and artificial intelligence, even economics and developmental biology. (These lessons are later critiqued amusingly and developed further in postings by a fictional newsgroup in the book's afterword.) As Turing's lectures progress, the lives of Alexandros, Ethel, and Ian converge in dramatic fashion, and the story takes us from Corfu to Hong Kong, from Athens to San Francisco--and of course to the Internet, the disruptive technological and social force that emerges as the main locale and protagonist of the novel.

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