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B. JACK COPELAND (ed.), The Essential Turing: The Ideas that Gave Birth to the Computer Age. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Pp. viii + 613. ISBN 0-19-825079-7. £50.00 (hardback). ISBN 0-19-825080-0. £14.99 (paperback). doi:10.1017/S0007087406448688
Alan M. Turing (1912-54) was the founder of modern computer science. Turing's classic 1936 paper, 'On computable numbers', defined mathematical computability, showed the existence of a universal machine and gave a new paradigm for the cognitive sciences. Later he produced a detailed electronic computer plan and the beginnings of artificial intelligence. Turing was also the leading scientific figure in the British cryptanalytic effort of the Second World War. Many will welcome anything that makes his papers more accessible. The selection of an 'essential' oeuvre, and the writing of critical annotations, is a less straightforward matter. These 613 pages show the attempt of the philosopher B. Jack Copeland.
Copeland's approach is energetic, clear and detailed in pursuit of a favoured topic or thesis, supplying copious secondary material and references. But he too easily leaves other subjects unrecognized and undiscussed. One deficiency appears immediately: no listing of Turing's works is supplied, so the reader cannot guess how complete this selection is. In fact, a four-volume Collected Works of A. M. Turing, annotated by distinguished mathematicians and computer scientists, was published between 1992 and 2001. Yet a careless reader, missing the small print on pages 409, 510 and 581, could remain unaware of it from Copeland's book.
Turing's principal wartime contribution to scientific cryptology was the development of Bayesian statistical methods, using 'weight of evidence'. In the Collected Works this achievement was represented with papers by his collaborator I. J. Good. In...