Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges, Douglas Hofstadter
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Book Reviews of Alan Turing: The Enigma
Book Review: Back in print!
Summary: 5 Stars
Few people outside computer science know how important Alan Turing really is - he just might be the most important person to have lived in the 20th century - and it is quite shocking that this is the only biography of him (other than one written by his mother) that there is. Even more shocking is that in this age that is absolutely Turing's, that his biography could go out of print! I know it will never happen again.This book is a work of 1st class scholarship, and obvious love. The world is a better place because of it.
Book Review: Essential.
Summary: 5 Stars
The one and only Turing biography you'll ever need, long enough to satisfy even the most hardcore Turing admirers. Irreproachably researched and thorough. I only wish Hodges offered an abridged version I could recommend to my friends- this book is too detailed for casual readers.Book Review: Hodges gets the science right.
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the difficult challenges for a scientific biographer is to get the science right. When the subject of the biography has contributed to multiple fields, this is even more difficult. Hodges rises to the challenge in this absorbing biography of the great Alan Turing.Book Review: Turing Explained - Turing Hijacked
Summary: 4 Stars
Alan Turing makes an absolutely fascinating subject for biography. Not only did Turing significantly contributed to the allied victory in World War II, but one may also consider him to be the father of the modern "thinking machine." Indeed, most introductory computer textbooks still contain references to the "Turing test" for artificial intelligence. In Part 1, Hodges writes a riveting account of Turing's youth, scientific pursuits, and war-time contributions. He carefully details descriptions of the German "Enigma" coding machine, coding theory, and the code breaking process. Having no significant background in mathematics or ciphering, the reader could probably build his or her own Enigma machine based solely on Hodge's lucid descriptions.
Unfortunately, Part 2 does more to promote Hodges' own agenda than it does to illuminate Turing's life. Hodges makes his agenda clear for Turing's biography following the Postscript in a section labeled "Author's Note from the 1983 Edition." In this, Hodges explains that he discovered Turing for himself while preparing a pamphlet critical of the current medical model of homosexuality as member of London's Gay Liberation Front (535). Part 2 of this biography clearly serves as a platform for that purpose.
While generally dull, Part 2 did offer a few surprises. Though not stated explicitly, Hodges' illustrations demonstrate that the premise behind "Clockwork Orange" finds its roots in the state of England's psychiatric medicine in the 1950's. Imprisonment, castration, hormone therapy, operant conditioning, and psychiatric treatment all played a part in the West's attempts to understand and cope with the nature of homosexuality and the male homosexual's role in society.
Since Turing himself did not crusade for gay rights or take any interest in the rather well known intellectual gay communities of the time, the author's agenda appears significantly out of place. Though persecuted, prosecuted, convicted, and "treated," Turing simply wished to be left alone to pursue his various interests. Hodges should have done the same. Yes, details of Turing's relationships, lifestyle, arrest, trial, and treatment belong in a biography along with their historical context, but Hodges frequently departs with obscure references and musings many readers might not understand and which were simply not part of Turing's own experience.
This biography also left me craving more details regarding the links between Turing's early work and his later work as well as for more details specifically about his later work. I don't think Turing simply changed fields of interest mid career. After all, buried within the mechanics of nature lie the seeds of non-artificial intelligence. What better way to recreate that intelligence artificially than by mastering and modeling the original?
I recommend special treatment for this biography. Rather than bullying your way through every page, simply start reading from the beginning, stop when you lose interest, and don't feel guilty about putting it down incomplete.
Book Review: A scientifically useful biography
Summary: 4 Stars
I read part of this book in 1985 while trying to understand chaotic orbits. The problem was to understand how an orbit can be deterministic and apparently random. When I read Hodges' description of the Turing machine then I realized that it is easy to answer the question, and was able to write down the answer: one simply digitizes the map or ode, initial condition, and all the control parameters in some base of arithmetic, and then studies the action of a (digitized) positive Liapunov exponent on a digit string. I can't comment on the rest of the book, but Hodges does a very good job of presenting Turing's ideas of computable numbers and computable functions. When my collaborator Palmore read the description I refer to here, he said that he nearly fell out of his chair. We solved the problem of computability of chaotic orbits in that era together.Is there a good book on computability and automata? So far, all the automata texts that I'm aware of are written in a special holy language of abstract computerize. The language erects an unnecessary barrier to understanding the basic ideas. Is Turing's original paper a proof, or an explanation of what he'd understood? I don't know, but I can refer the reader to "Descartes' Dream" by Reuben and Hersch for perespective.