“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral , George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things—and our universe would never be the same.
Using five kilobytes of memory (the amount allocated to displaying the cursor on a computer desktop of today), they achieved unprecedented success in both weather prediction and nuclear weapons design, while tackling, in their spare time, problems ranging from the evolution of viruses to the evolution of stars.
Dyson’s account, both historic and prophetic, sheds important new light on how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II. The proliferation of both codes and machines was paralleled by two historic developments: the decoding of self-replicating sequences in biology and the invention of the hydrogen bomb. It’s no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time.
How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan Turing’s one-dimensional model became John von Neumann’s two-dimensional implementation, Turing’s Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next.
0 有用 pluskid 2020-05-02 12:43:55
“The new computer was assigned two problems: how to destroy life as we know it, and how to create life of unknown forms.” 一本介绍通用计算机的起源的书。相比以往看到的一些计算机史话之类的读物,这本书的特点应该是作者做了大量的研究和考证,并不是抓住一些吸引眼球的点和一些八卦轶事大... “The new computer was assigned two problems: how to destroy life as we know it, and how to create life of unknown forms.” 一本介绍通用计算机的起源的书。相比以往看到的一些计算机史话之类的读物,这本书的特点应该是作者做了大量的研究和考证,并不是抓住一些吸引眼球的点和一些八卦轶事大做文章,而是试图完整地还原当时的整个历史背景和过程,当然这样导致的结果有好有坏。好的是感觉这本书的内容是比较真实可信的,特别是如果要做历史研究之类的应该是不错的参考资料吧,坏的就是内容有点太多了,而且读起来少了许多跌宕起伏。 书虽然以图灵为题,但是全书最核心的人物还是冯诺依曼。冯诺依曼原本是搞纯数 (展开)
0 有用 _ 2013-04-11 14:35:57
非常好!
1 有用 散西风 2015-02-15 11:15:43
这辈子买过最不好读的书之一,跳了整一章,再读下一章还读不下去,于是放弃了
0 有用 许三 2015-01-28 12:15:55
Probable computation