Turing’s Cathedral

Title: Turing’s Cathedral
Author: George Dysson
Publisher: DEBATE
ISBN: 9788499922508
Review: : “It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence” a 24-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. A small group of men and women met in Princeton, New Jersey, around the 40s and 50s. They were led by John Von Neumann, and their common goal was to build one of the world’s earliest computers which would materialise the vision of Alan Turing about a universal machine. Codes generated inside this 5-kilobytes embryo of universe (less storage than a single screen icon from a present-day computer needs) began to distinguish between numbers meaning things, and numbers doing things, and then our universe was forever changed. Turing’s Cathedral tells the story of how the most constructive invention of 20th century, digital computer, was built and who were its creators. A prophetic and historical narrative which describes how that code succeed in conquering the world and presents the future of digital world.