Alan Turing

What Hacker News says

1. jacquesmSep 2023
   Based on in the loosest sense apparently, from TFA:

   " I read the masterful biography that the screenplay is based on, Andrew Hodges’ Alan Turing: The Enigma, to find out. I discovered that The Imitation Game takes major liberties with its source material, injecting conflict where none existed, inventing entirely fictional characters, rearranging the chronology of events, and misrepresenting the very nature of Turing’s work at Bletchley Park. "

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2. ruggeriDec 2022
   I second this!

   In a similar, but different, vein, I also recommend Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges. Do not be turned off by the useless film adaptation. The book is intelligent and fascinating, and more aimed at someone with an undergraduate level understanding of math and logic, rather than a general layperson.

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3. rg111Feb 2022
   - The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson is a great book that taught me a lot. It covers the gradual discovery of computers from Babbage and comes to modern ages. I highly recommend it. This book is also very fun to read.

   - Seven Brief Lessons in Physics by Carlo Rovelli is a brief, enjoyable, and great read. This book is good for both layperson and experts.

   - Albert Einstein is Einstein's biography by Walter Isaacson. Really nice book.

   - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick (author of Chaos and The Information) is another great biography. This biography shows the evolution of his science as well as evolution of his person and thoughts. Great book. Background in Physics will be very helpful if you want to read this one.

   - The Mathematical Experience David, Hersh is a very succinct and pleasant book on the history of Maths. Will recommend.

   - Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges is a good mathematician's biography. I have not finished it, but fully intend to.

   - I have just read some of The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattyacharya is a biography of John von Neumann. It already seems very good and I plan to read through the end.

   - The Annotated Turing deals a lot with history and is a read of a lifetime.

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   - I have not read A Mind at Work yet. It is a biography of Claude Shanon. I would recommend you to check it out.

   - Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind is also recommended highly. I plan to read it.

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   I have recently watched a BBC Documentary that I thoroughly liked. One of its themes that had striken me was the change of science from fully deterministic to probabilistic. It's an extremely important paradigm shift for all of science.

   The name is Dangerous Knowledge (2007).

   The people covered are- Cantor, Boltzmann, Godel, and Turing.

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4. st_goliathJun 2021
   Some years back, I got myself a copy of Andrew Hodges "Alan Turing - The Enigma", a biography and IMO generally a good read, but also with some gems regarding very early computing history in it.

   Specifically, after WWII, Turing worked on the ACE 1 (later reduced to Pilot ACE) project to build an electronic computer, which didn't really progress due to management and bureaucracy overhead. He eventually went to Manchester, once they got their Manchester Mark 1 off the ground, which they tried to commercialize as "Ferranti Mark 1" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti_Mark_1).

   While employed for the University, Turing IIRC continued to work as an external consultant for whatever became of G.C. & C.S. on the side. According to the book, he convinced them to buy such a machine (presumably for crypt-analysis?) and, on the Manchester side of things, insisted on some modifications to be made, including a "horizontal adder", so it could count the number of bits set in a word with a single instruction, i.e. a popcount instruction. This would pre-date the IBM Stretch mentioned in the article.

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5. PaulAJMar 2020
   * Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence by Andrew Hodges. The definitive biography, with lots of detailed explanations of his work.

   * Making Software, edited by Oram & Wilson. A bunch of papers about evidence-based software engineering.

   * Beautiful Code, also edited by Oram & Wilson. A bunch of papers about especially elegant pieces of software.

   * Eiffel, by Bertrand Meyer. What Java should have been.

   * The Devil's DP Dictionary, by Stan Kelly Bootle. A satirical look at the computer industry circa 1980.

   * The Jargon File. (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/). The language of the Elder Days.

   * Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert Glass.

   * The Pragmatic Programmer by Hunt & Thomas.

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6. emmelaichAug 2019
   You should read Andrew Hodges work "Alan Turing: The Enigma" on which "The Imitation Game" is allegedly partly based.

   The contrasts are striking.

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