The Annotated Turing

By Charles Petzold,

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

Book description

Programming Legend Charles Petzold unlocks the secrets of the extraordinary and prescient 1936 paper by Alan M. Turing

Mathematician Alan Turing invented an imaginary computer known as the Turing Machine; in an age before computers, he explored the concept of what it meant to be computable, creating the field of…

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1 author picked The Annotated Turing as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Ron Kneusel

Author

Alan Turing’s 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” was foundational to the development of computer science. To this day, Turing machines, the theoretical computational devices imagined in Turing’s paper, are a research cornerstone as they embody the concept of “computable.” If a programming language can implement a Turing machine, then the language is deemed Turing complete and is, therefore, general-purpose enough to implement any algorithm.

Turing’s paper is readable, but Petzold’s book breaks it down in minute detail to explain the nomenclature and meaning behind Turing’s words. I believe all computer science students should study…

From Ron's list on the background and foundation of AI.