Pelican Books
Dr. Jay David Boulter
£3.95

The future features strongly this month, both the years far ahead with the way that the computer and man are going to integrate and the immediate future with the process of computer communications, which is heavily used at present, but is also definitely a land mark in the time to come.

The first book is called Turing's Man and before we actually begin to examine the book. I shall first briefly introduce to you Turing, who he was and his concept of the Turing machine.

Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, born in 1912 and died at the age of 42. The paper which made him famous posed the question "how far the exercise of logic resembles a mechanical process". This provided computer scientists with what has become the concept of a Turing machine. The definition of a Turing machine is, wait for it, "a hypothetical universal computing machine able to modify its original instructions by reading, erasing or writing a new symbol on a moving tape of fixed length that acts as its program".

The above quotes may give you an idea of the sort of book this is. The book itself gives a great insight into the link between history and the computer technology of our day (and perhaps the future) and provides a bridge between the gap.

A quote on the back cover from Beryl Bainbridge says that "the subject affects every one of us", and indeed it does. The question however is that, without seeming to be a Philistine, do we really need to know?

TURING MAN

The book goes into great detail of how the Turing Man should be made up, in fact the author's general idea of the man that Turing envisaged. But my own idea formed from the book is that Turing's Man is really not too interested in the history of man, although this lack of interest should be impressed upon him. Perhaps I myself have gone too far down the path of Turing's man to be interested in the history of the advancing age of the computer.

We are all in some respects Turing's men, and the book clearly defines if you are one or are not. Turing's man very simply is someone who agrees with the view that the computer is giving us a new definition of man, as an "Information processor" and of nature as "information to be processed". A Turing man is also one who thinks like a computer. One who in every day life thinks in the way a computer thinks.

The book is too vast even to present a precis of the text here and even then I am sure that I would not do the book justice. The text goes far back into ancient classical times, right up to the current century, and further, and shows the reader the way the Greeks devised the computer and the effect that this had upon our lives. Stepping forward in time, the clock is taken as the key machine of the modern industrial age. Time keeping is a subject which the author proposes ended up controlling men, so is the computer as we know it going to end up controlling man? After reading the book, I thought yes, although I am not too sure if the author shares my opinion.

This argument, and I do feel that I would lose it if faced with Doctor Bolter himself, is one of many which the book creates. It is very difficult though to establish who the book is aimed at. Will the prospective reader be more interested in the Artificial Intelligence side of the Turing idea rather than the philosophical background? The book is ideally aimed at the man in the middle, much like the author himself, who is a man of history as well as a man of computers.

Due to its content, the book will not be suitable for the computer enthusiast whose main aim is to play computer games, but for anyone who is bored with the usual mundane front end of the computer and requires to go further into the computer, then this book provides the reader with enough detail to leave him thinking about the technical age of computing, from the past right through to the future.