Turing's Cathedral

How did computers take over the world? In late 1945, a small group of brilliant engineers and mathematicians gathered at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their ostensible goal was to build a computer which would be instrumental in the US government's race to create a hydrogen bomb. The mathematicians themselves, however, saw their project as the realization of Alan Turing's theoretical 'universal machine.' In Turing's Cathedral, George Dyson vividly re-creates the intense experimentation, incredible mathematical insight and pure creative genius that led to the dawn of the digital universe, uncovering a wealth of new material to bring a human story of extraordinary men and women and their ideas to life. From the lowliest iPhone app to Google's sprawling metazoan codes, we now live in a world of self-replicating numbers and self-reproducing machines whose origins go back to a 5-kilobyte matrix that still holds clues as to what may lie ahead.

ISBN 9780718194505   Format Electronic Book ISBN13 9780718194505 (What's this?)   Pages 432 Publisher Penguin Books Ltd   Previous ISBN 9780713997507 Imprint Penguin

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Version	Price	Published	Edition
Paperback	£9.99	2013
Electronic Book	£20.34
Hardback	£25.00	2012