Tag: Annotated Turing
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The long tail of a Zipf distribution
Back in the days of the first dot.com bubble the talk was of the “long tail” – how web retailers could make a lot of money by selling small amounts of a large number of different things. True enough, one of the great survivors of those days – Amazon – does make money from the…
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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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An idea I saw on normblog
Norman Geras is a great man. He’s a social, not a computer, scientist, and this year I have been mainly reading computer books. Still, here’s an idea I have pinched off his website (he got it from here). Match the prompts to books you have read in the last year – in my case mainly…
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In continued praise of “Programming Pearls”
I have read two books in the last year that have fundamentally changed the way I think about computers and programming – The Annotated Turing and Programming Pearls. Programming Pearls in particular continues to inspire me in the way it makes you think about building better algorithms and using data structures better – and here’s…
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The diagonal proof
I am just reading Computability and Logic and it (or at least the old, 1980, edition I am reading) has a rather laboured explanation of Cantor’s 1891 proof of the non-enumerability of real numbers (the diagonal proof) so to reassure myself and because it is interesting I thought I’d set out a version here (closely…
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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…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 