The Essential Turing: Seminal Writings in Computing, Logic, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial Life plus The Secrets of Enigma

Alan M. Turing, B. Jack Copeland0-19-825079-7, 0-19-825080-0, 9780198250791

Alan Turing, pioneer of computing and World War II code-breaker, was one of the most important and influential thinkers of the twentieth century. The astonishing output of his tragically short life included the universal Turing Machine (the theoretical foundation of all modern computing), the electro-mechanical ‘bombes’ used at Bletchley Park to decipher the Enigma code, his ground-breaking design for an electronic stored-programme computer, and work on artificial intelligence and artificial life so revolutionary that he can claim to be the founding father of these disciplines. In this book, Turing’s key writings in all these subjects are made easily accessible for the first time. Lectures, scientific papers, top secret wartime material, correspondence, and broadcasts are introduced and set in context by Jack Copeland, Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing.

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Table of contents :
Contents……Page 8
Alan Turing 1912–1954……Page 10
Computable Numbers: A Guide……Page 14
1. On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936)……Page 67
2. On Computable Numbers: Corrections and Critiques……Page 100
3. Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals (1938), including excerpts from Turing’s correspondence, 1936–1938……Page 134
4. Letters on Logic to Max Newman (c.1940)……Page 214
Enigma……Page 226
5. History of Hut 8 to December 1941 (1945), featuring an excerpt from Turing’s ‘Treatise on the Enigma’……Page 274
6. Bombe and Spider (1940)……Page 322
7. Letter to Winston Churchill (1941)……Page 345
8. Memorandum to OP-20-G on Naval Enigma (c.1941)……Page 350
Artificial Intelligence……Page 362
9. Lecture on the Automatic Computing Engine (1947)……Page 371
10. Intelligent Machinery (1948)……Page 404
11. Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)……Page 442
12. Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory (c.1951)……Page 474
13. Can Digital Computers Think? (1951)……Page 485
14. Can Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said to Think? (1952)……Page 496
Artificial Life……Page 516
15. The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis (1952)……Page 528
16. Chess (1953)……Page 571
17. Solvable and Unsolvable Problems (1954)……Page 585
A……Page 606
B……Page 607
C……Page 608
D……Page 610
E……Page 611
G……Page 612
H……Page 613
L……Page 614
M……Page 615
O……Page 616
P……Page 617
S……Page 618
T……Page 619
U……Page 621
Z……Page 622