Friday, February 24, 2012

Special Issue on Alan Turing in Nature

The prestigious science publication Nature has just published a special issue celebrating Alan Turing. In its introduction they say:
   "Alan Turing, born a century ago this year, is best known for his wartime code-breaking and for inventing the 'Turing machine' – the concept at the heart of every computer today. But his legacy extends much further: he founded the field of artificial intelligence, proposed a theory of biological pattern formation and speculated about the limits of computation in physics. In this collection of features and opinion pieces, Nature celebrates the mind that, in a handful of papers over a tragically short lifetime, shaped many of the hottest fields in science today."
   There are many excellent articles in the special issue, which I can highly recommend, by Turing experts including: Andrew Hodges, George Dyson and Barry Cooper. There's also a short science-fiction story Ghost in the Machine that rounds the special issue off.

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