TuringΓÇÖs Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

Опубликовано 8 сентября 2016, 17:32

ΓÇ£It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,ΓÇ¥ twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. A small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, built one of the first computers to realize Alan TuringΓÇÖs vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan TuringΓÇÖs one-dimensional model became John von NeumannΓÇÖs two-dimensional implementation, TuringΓÇÖs Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next.