Turing's cathedral: the origins of the digital universe
“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things—and our universe would never be the same.
Using five kilobytes of memory (the amount allocated to displaying the cursor on a computer desktop of today), they achieved unprecedented success in both weather prediction and nuclear weapons design, while tackling, in their spare time, problems ranging from the evolution of viruses to the evolution of stars.
Dyson’s account, both historic and prophetic, sheds important new light on how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II. The proliferation of both codes and machines was paralleled by two historic developments: the decoding of self-replicating sequences in biology and the invention of the hydrogen bomb. It’s no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time.
How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan Turing’s one-dimensional model became John von Neumann’s two-dimensional implementation, Turing’s Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next.
9780307969088
9780307969095
9781400075997
9780307969064
Grouping Information
Grouped Work ID | 13f560aa-0e25-7818-5a9e-692e9e18bcb8 |
---|---|
Grouping Title | turings cathedral |
Grouping Author | george dyson |
Grouping Category | book |
Grouping Language | English (eng) |
Last Grouping Update | 2024-05-04 22:17:40PM |
Last Indexed | 2024-05-04 22:38:13PM |
Solr Fields
Online OverDrive Collection
Online OverDrive Collection
“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things—and our universe would never be the same.
Using five kilobytes of memory (the amount allocated to displaying the cursor on a computer desktop of today), they achieved unprecedented success in both weather prediction and nuclear weapons design, while tackling, in their spare time, problems ranging from the evolution of viruses to the evolution of stars.
Dyson’s account, both historic and prophetic, sheds important new light on how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II. The proliferation of both codes and machines was paralleled by two historic developments: the decoding of self-replicating sequences in biology and the invention of the hydrogen bomb. It’s no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time.
How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan Turing’s one-dimensional model became John von Neumann’s two-dimensional implementation, Turing’s Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next.
Books
eBook
CD Audiobook
eAudiobook
9780307969088
9780307969095
9780375422775
9781400075997
ADULT BOOK ON CD
Online OverDrive
East Hampton Public Library Online
Online OverDrive Collection
Random House Audio
Vintage Books
Computable functions
Computers -- History
Random access memory
Turing machines
Turing, Alan, -- 1912-1954
Von Neumann, John, -- 1903-1957
Turing's cathedral : the origins of the digital universe / George Dyson
Turing's cathedral [the origins of the digital universe] / George Dyson
Turing's cathedral the origins of the digital universe / George Dyson
Computable functions
Computer Technology
Computers
History
Nonfiction
Random access memory
Science
Turing machines
Turing, Alan
Von Neumann, John
Solr Details Tables
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