The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine

Turing's 1936 Paper "On Computational Numbers" is often cited as a landmark in the history of computing, but it's details are not widely considered or well known today. If you're curious to know more about the Paper, and why it's important, you can do no better than read this book. It contains a complete transcript of the original Paper, with extensive commentary and explanation from Petzold that make the Paper accessible and understandable to a wider audience (and even for specialists, this book is probably a better choice than just reading the original Paper!). Petzold's enthusiasm for the topic shines through in an excellent writing style, striking a good balance between detailed technicalities and simpler descriptions, in a friendly helpful way that will neither confuse the layman nor bore the expert.Petzold supplies invaluable historical context: some of the developments in mathematics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that undoubtedly influenced Turing, and which appear explicitly in the paper. This is a very useful aid to understanding Turing's paper for readers not expert in those topics of mathematics (which is almost all of us who don't have post-graduate degrees in very specialised areas of pure maths!). But the book is definitely aimed at readers with some mathematical background and aptitude. If (UK) O-level / GCSE maths was a mystery to you, you may struggle; if you have A-level maths or computing you'll be fine. If you're somewhere in between, Petzold's explanations will happily guide you through the details.Two things this book isn't: First, if you want a book that starts from Turing's paper then delves into even more advanced mathematical research and theories, then this isn't the one for you (although it does helpfully include a summary of more recent work that follows on from Turing's ideas). Second, at the other extreme: although this book includes some biographical information, if you want a detailed non-technical biography of Turing you should look elsewhere.But for all the rest of us between these two extremes, who want to understand what Turing machines are from the original source, then I wholeheartedly recommend this book.My only complaint, and a very minor one, is that Petzold's description of Bletchley Park's location would place it in Suffolk rather than Buckinghamshire! But given the complexity of the book's subject matter, it is a testament to the quality of Petzold's research that this is his only error.

As part of a numerous group of programmers without a university degree in the field, it is not too easy for me to grasp the academic language of many fundamental texts. Therefore, it's probably no surprise that I was not very satisfied after finishing Turing's paper. I got the main idea, sure, but I did not have the patience and diligence required to decipher his machine descriptions and truly grasp the monumental achievement which this paper represents.I recently read Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, and was fascinated by it. Here, Petzold again grabbed my attention and held it for almost the entirety of the book (almost, since some portions are more difficult than others, but not excessively so). He takes Turing's paper, and the correction published a year later, and dissects them vigorously, presenting a lot of background knowledge, historical events and plenty of illustrative examples.The best word I can use to summarize is: Wow. This is the kind of book which leaves you feeling good about yourself. To someone like me, lacking any formal education in information theory, mathematical logic and all the other subjects more or less present in a CS course, this is a must-read.Therefore, as stated in the headline, if you're here, reading this book's description and trying to decide whether it's worth it - it truly is. Even if, unlike me, you're able to fully comprehend On Computable Numbers, you'll probably learn a lot from it, or, at the very least, enjoy the read.

* SynopsisThe author gives insight into the man and his most influential work. Turing's contribution work with cracking the Enigma is recorded as having shortened WW2 by 2 years.* Topics covered1 Foundations, 11 Computable Numbers, 111 Das Enscheidungsproblem 111v And beyond.* CommentaryI bought this book to have insight into Turing's paper on how to make a universal Turing machine, or what is now known as a computer. The book covers the man's history and his works in a delicate way that has a way of explaining that makes light of it. And a much better job of simplifying the work of the genius computer scientist so the reader can feel the possibilities of the work. This is limited as the author says, and I quote,'Because the Universal Machine is so essential to Turing's arguments in the rest of his paper, he proves the existence of such a machine by actually constructing it in full excruciating detail. However, once you understand the basic mechanism, you might find these details rather tedious. No one will punish you if you don't assimilate every symbol and function in Turing's description.' (P149)The author of this book is a surprisingly good explainer of the man's work and the book is easy to read. Around the time of Turing, the only way to the program was in binary for simple operations and data. His research implemented subroutines and if-then decisions. procedures structuring. The fact he was so ahead of his time and even touched on A.I. work on such primitive machines is a stunning portrait of the man. There is coverage of light computing topics such as how following computer languages influenced the current common languages.* SummaryThis book has a light touch on a deep topic of the man and his work. I read it in a few days and enjoyed it. If this statement the cracking of the Enigma shortened WW2 by two years is accepted and saved 14 million lives. This ties in with the dropping of the atomic bombs to also have shortened the war by 2 years, and saved 2 million lives of troops. The war could have been still going on until 1950, which is sobering.