Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker

I. Turing's Life and Thoughts.- Alan Turing: an Introductory Biography.- Alan's Apple: Hacking the Turing Test.- What Would Alan Turing Have Done After 1954?.- From Turing to the Information Society.- II. Computation and Turing Machines.- The Mechanization of Mathematics.- Hypercomputational Models.- Turing's Ideas and Models of Computation.- The Myth of Hypercomputation.- Quantum Computers: the Church-Turing Hypothesis Versus the Turing Principle.- Implementation of a Self-replicating Universal Turing Machine.- Cognitive Science and the Turing Machine: an Ecological Perspective.- III. Artificial Intelligence and the Turing Test.- Can Machines Think?.- The Computer, Artificial Intelligence, and the Turing Test.- A Note on Enjoying Strawberries with Cream, Making Mistakes, and Other Idiotic Features.- Robots and Rule-Following.- The Law of Accelerating Returns.- IV. The Enigma.- The Polish Brains Behind the Breaking of the Enigma Code Before and During the Second World War.- Alan Turing at Bletchley Park in World War II.- Alan M. Turing's Contributions to Co-operation Between the UK and the US.- V. Almost Forgotten Ideas.- Watching the Daisies Grow: Turing and Fibonacci Phyllotaxis.- Turing's Connectionism.- List of Contributors.

Christof Teuscher holds an electronic engineer degree and received the diploma degree in computer engineering (equivalent to a MSCS degree) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL) in 2000. Since then, he has been a research and teaching assistant in the Logic Systems Laboratory at EPFL, pursuing the Ph.D. degree in the field of biologically-inspired computing machines.

Christof Teuscher's work has been honored with several awards. His first book has been published by Springer-Verlag in 2001: Turing's Connectionism: An Investigation of Neural Network Architectures. He was head of the BioWall project that was widely covered by the media. Christof's second book - Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker - will be published in 2003. Christof has also been nominated for a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Christof Teuscher is the initiator and organizer of the Turing Day and an organizer and program chair of the 5th International Workshop on Information Processing in Cells in Tissues, IPCAT2003. He is also a member of the program committee of the 5th International Conference on Evolvable Systems: From Biology to Hardware, ICES'03, of the 7th European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL2003, and of the NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware, EH-2003.

From the reviews:



"This is a wonderful book, which does deliver what it promises; and that is no small feat. ... One of the things that I like in the book is its sense of fun. ... It is beautifully written and contains a very nice survey of an area that deserves to be better known to mathematicians. ... Finally, the book is beautifully produced, abundantly illustrated ... . I recommend it to everyone interested in any aspect of Turing's legacy ... ." (S.C. Coutinho, The Mathematical Gazette, Vol. 89 (516), 2005)



"This remarkable volume is the serendipitous result of Christof Teuscher realizing in September 2001 that Turing would have celebrated his 90th birthday on June 23, 2002. ... This book is the definitive collection of commemorative essays, and the distinguished contributors have expertise in such diverse fields as artificial intelligence, natural computing, mathematics, physics, cryptography, cognitive studies, philosophy and anthropology. The volume spans the entire rich spectrum of Turing's life, research work and legacy." (Cryptologia, Vol. 29 (1), 2005)

"It is difficult to find the superlatives to describe the wonderful job the contributors to this book have done. Every chapter is written in an expository fashion, demanding very little in the way of background knowledge from any scientifically minded reader. The range of topics is also impressive ... . I unreservedly recommend this book to anyone even slightly interested in the continuing role of Turing's work in the development of computer science in particular, and ideas in general." (John L. Casti, nature, Issue 428, 2004)