Tag: Alan Turing
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Two cheers for Gove?
Michael Gove is to make a speech today in which he is going to lambast the existing ICT curriculum in English schools and promise a revolutionary new start. Sounds like a good thing, and certainly he appears to have identified the cretinous nature of the current curriculum and its chaining to Microsoft’s proprietary software. So…
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My (computer science) book of the year
It wasn’t published in 2011 but The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine is without doubt my computer science book of the year. If books can change your life then The Annotated Turing changed mine – because it showed me just how strong the link…
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Very small Turing machines
I am pretty busy with work now, so one of the things I had planned to do – write a simple Turing Machine in Groovy – will have to wait. In the meantime here are some very small Turing machines to wonder over. Related articles A turing machine in 133 bytes of javascript (swizec.com) Is…
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The Great Alan Turing
Slashdot have a story to the effect that Leonardo DiCaprio is to play Alan Turing in a film that will mark the mathematician’s centenary next year. Great news – the man’s memory deserves nothing more than the actor who has proved himself to be both great and edgy in recent work (he’s certainly not the…
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The importance of Turing’s findings
Yesterday I was speaking to a friend – who knows about computers but not about computer science – who told me this blog was just too difficult: so I thought I’d seek to order my own thoughts after reading The Annotated Turing and assist humanity in general (!) by writing a piece that explains what…
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Broken peer review is nothing new
I have been pressing on with The Annotated Turing and have now made it to page 163. And I see no reason to withdraw my earlier enthusiastic partial review: I just wish I’d read it a year or more ago as it has no immediate bearing on the MSc this year, though is still a…
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Bought on a whim but seems like a good one
I bought this book this evening on the way home from work – The Annotated Turing – and have already got through fifty pages. (Actually I wish I had bought it from Amazon because the price there is less than half I paid for it). Those pages covered much of the same ground as the…
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