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Everybody agrees: Blogging is a crucial tool for marketing books. It is from blogs that people first hear about books; it is through blogging that the potential reader's interest is aroused; and it is through blogging that the reader is ultimately seduced into purchasing the book, resulting in yet another $2.25 of income to the author. What nobody tells you is this: It's not the author's blog that's important. The author's own blog is pretty much inconsequential. Nobody reads that thing, and really — why should they? It's actually other people's blogs — and in particular Jeff Atwood's take on The Annotated Turing — that perform the magic feat of causing a book's Amazon.com sales rank to climb from ~20,000 to 368 throughout the course of a single day. I'm sure the sales rank for The Annotated Turing will soon be back to normal, but meanwhile, thanks Jeff! Now Available! Wiley Amazon US Barnes & Noble Amazon Canada Amazon UK Amazon Deutsch Amazon Français Amazon Japan Read More...
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In January, 1952, English mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing was arrested for having sex with another man. The law that Alan Turing broke was the infamous Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Section 11 prohibited "any act of gross indecency with another male person" and specified that offenders "be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour." The term "gross indecency" was not specifically defined in the law, but it was understood to mean any sexual contact other than that denoted by the quaint English legal term "buggery." Oral sex or mutual masturbation would fall under the category of "gross indecency." Section 11 was controversial from its very beginning. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 described itself as "An Act to make further provision for the protection of women and girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes." The law raised the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16, and contained several provisions Read More...
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I'm pretty sure I've never been to MTV's web site before, and I definitely won't try to claim that I'm familiar with everyone mentioned in the article Lil Wayne, Kanye West And LL Cool J Fly Girl Talk's Friendly Skies, Unknowingly, In Bigger Than The Sound , but check out what book Peter Fonda was reading on the plane (4th paragraph, 4th line). Or perhaps the guy just looked like Peter Fonda, like so many other readers of The Annotated Turing . Now Available! Wiley Amazon US Barnes & Noble Amazon Canada Amazon UK Amazon Deutschland Amazon France Amazon Japan Blackwell Read More...
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Yesterday I received a few “hot off the presses” copies of The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine , kindly forwarded to me by Wiley, the book's publisher. Even after writing 15 books over the past 20 years, I still get a thrill when I see the first copies. Just to get a sense how the book is shipping to people other than the author, a couple weeks ago Deirdre and I submitted test orders to Amazon and Barnes & Noble. This morning B&N sent me an email saying that the book is "now packed and ready to leave our warehouse." I guess they're just waiting for the UPS guy to show up. Amazon hasn't been quite as prompt; let's just hope they don't mess up royally like they did with 3D Programming for Windows . I wish I could say that The Annotated Turing was "10 years in the making" but it's really only been 9 years. I created the first Word file for the book on May 12, 1999, and I sent my final fixes to the production Read More...
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Last Wednesday, May 28, 2008, was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. A front page article in today's Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times by Charles McGrath entitled "That License to Kill Is Still Unexpired" includes a photo of the famous Enigma machine with the caption "The first Bond novelist, Ian Fleming, worked for British naval intelligence during World War II and was concerned with devices like the German Enigma, an encryption device. (The online version of the story includes the caption but not the photo.) The Enigma machine was also Alan Turing's big concern while working at Bletchley Park, the center of Great Britain's code-breaking activities during the war. As discussed by David Kahn in Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-Boat Codes, 1939-1943 (Houghton-Mifflin, 1991), 124-126 and Stephen Budiansky in Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (Free Press, 2000), 158-159, Read More...
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The second chapter of my forthcoming book The Annotated Turing is entitled "The Irrational and the Transcendental" and innocently begins: We begin counting 1, 2, 3, and we can go on as long as we want. That's not true, of course. "We" simply cannot continue counting "as long as we want" because "We" (meaning "I" the author and "you" the reader) will someday die — probably in the middle of reciting a very long (but undoubtedly finite) number. What the sentence really means is that some abstract ideal "somebody" can continue counting, but that's not true either: Counting is a temporal process, and at some point everybody will be gone in a heat-dead universe. There will be no one left to count. Even long before that time, counting will be limited by the resources of the universe, which contains only a finite number of elementary particles and a finite amount of energy to increment from one integer to the next. We tend to accept simple statements such as the one that begins Chapter 2 Read More...
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For quite awhile I assumed that my forthcoming book The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine would not even mention Dutch mathematician Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer (1881 – 1966). I was seriously mistaken. Brouwer played a major role in the debates in the early decades of the last century involving the foundations of mathematics. Three distinct approaches emerged, called logicism , formalism , and intuitionism . Logicism is mostly closely associated with Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's three-volume Principia Mathematica , which carried on the work of Gottlob Frege in attempting to derive all of mathematics from basic principles of logic. Formalism is mostly closely associated with David Hilbert, who tried to treat mathematics in a strictly formal manner as the manipulation of symbols. Most important to Hilbert were the establishment of certain metamathematical characteristics of axiomatic systems, Read More...
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If I have one hope for my book, The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine , it is to help readers understand the difference between Turing's original Turing Machine, and the Turing Machine as it's commonly encountered in college courses and textbooks. Two decades after Turing's paper that introduced his computing machines, the Turing Machine was reformulated by Stephen Kleene in Introduction to Metamathematics (1952) and Martin Davis in Computability and Unsolvability (1958). These reformulated machines — which generally compute functions — dominate the current literature on computability. The "halting problem" (the term is Martin Davis's) involves the existence of a general algorithm to determine whether an arbitrary machine finishes properly and halts, or whether it goes bad and runs forever. As I've mentioned before ( 2006-08-11 , 2007-11-26 , 2007-12-02 , 2008-05-12 ), it is not correct to associate Read More...
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The ideal length of a song is 3 minutes. The ideal length of a movie is 2 hours. The ideal length of a book is 300 pages. Of course, these "ideals" are really more like averages, and much leeway is allowed. There is nothing wrong at all with the lengths of "Der Abschied," Lawrence of Arabia , or Clarissa . But under the "life is too short" principle, we are usually inclined to favor movies and books of modest duration. We need more persuasion or confidence to begin tackling a work that's much longer than these ideals. Whenever Deirdre and I are browsing the New Nonfiction section of a bookstore, we're always reading off intriguing titles or jacket copy to each other, but also checking the page count. A book that seems interesting at 300 pages needs to be a lot more compelling at 500 pages. For that reason, I have sometimes tried to write 300-page books. I would very much like to write a 300-page book. But I have always failed. All the time I was working on Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Read More...
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Wiley — my publisher for The Annotated Turing — will this morning ship the book's files to the printer. Sometime after that, printed books will emerge. The official publication date seems to be June 16. It's been my last chance to fix things. For the past several days I've been scouring PDF files of the front matter (copyright page, epigraph, table of contents, and introduction), the 18 chapters, and the bibliography, hoping to find and correct a few final errors, and to persuade the production editor that movie titles should be italicized rather than appear in quotation marks. (The book refers to Soylent Green , the Back to the Future trilogy, and 2001 .) Yesterday morning I discovered that a sentence on page 39 contains a mixed metaphor that I probably wrote years ago and which only now leaped out to taunt me: "With these foundations being nailed into place shortly before the turn of the century, mathematics seemed to be on a good track, ..." I toyed around with changing Read More...
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I occasionally receive printed catalogs specific to Antiquarian Science from Jeff Weber Rare Books , and I always find them fascinating. Not all of the items are expensive, but the more interesting of them surely are. For example, the Antiquarian Science catalog for Winter 2007 lists a book entitled The First Six Books of The Elements of Euclid in which coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of learners by Oliver Byrne, published in London in 1847. Jeff Weber Rare Books is selling a copy of this for $9,500. Some of the most expensive items in the recent catalog are for periodicals rather than books: An offprint from a 1958 paper by John von Neumann from the Annals of Mathematics for $200. The 1950 issue of the British journal of philosophy Mind containing Alan Turing's famous paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (in which he proposed what has come to be known as the Turing Test) for $1,500. The 1953 issue of Nature that contains the paper Read More...
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My wife Deirdre has just designed a new web site specifically for my forthcoming book, The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine : www.TheAnnotatedTuring.com Deidre also wishes to speak to my blog audience directly. Here she is: As readers of this blog know, Charles has an exciting new book coming out in June. The Annotated Turing promises to be an important resource for history of computing buffs, educators and students of mathematics and computer science, programmers who want a deeper understanding of the machines on their desks, and long-time fans of Charles's writing. Charles's publisher Wiley is making a tremendous effort to get copies of the book into the hands of reviewers and professors. Instructors can request an evaluation copy of the book from The Annotated Turing page of Wiley's web site . We're also trying to compile some information that might help Wiley and us to publicize the book: Did you encounter any Read More...
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In the 9 years or so I was working (on and off) on my new book The Annotated Turing I accumulated a bunch of books related to Alan Turing, the Turing Machine, and the mathematical foundations behind Turing's paper on computability. Many of these books were last assembled together in a bookcase in the guest room of our house in Roscoe, New York. These photos were taken on January 24, shortly before we came back to New York City and some of the books had to be separated from their siblings. Aberth to Chaitin (900K) Church to Franzén (1M) Frege to Hilbert (1M) Hilbert to Minsky (970K) Mlodinow to Schöning (880K) Seife to Wilder (860K) Read More...
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In 1999, as I was finishing work on my book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software , I had ideas for four "spin-off" books. I prepared single-page descriptions of each of these book ideas and showed them to my agent. None of these books was "normal" in any way. One of the oddest was a book I called Mr. Turing's Computing Machine . In researching Code , I read (or tried to read) many of the seminal books and papers that contributed to the early history of computing. One of these was Alan Turing's 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" in which he invents the imaginary computer now called the Turing Machine. In trying to comprehend this paper, I thought "This is such an important paper in the history of computing that somebody should really write a book explaining what's going on in here." I think the whole concept of the book sprung into my head almost fully formed: I would take Turing's paper and annotate the living daylights Read More...
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