Alan’s father, Julius, was in the Indian civil service, and it was in Chatrapur, near Madras, that the child was conceived. Little Alan was interested in numbers (as on lamp posts), and new words (like ‘quockling’ for the noise made by seagulls fighting over food, and ‘squaddy’ for squat and square).

To the young Alan, technology meant factories teeming with human labour. In April 1936, he wrote a paper titled ‘On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.’ For starters, the tongue twister is German for ‘decision problem’, a math challenge posed by David Hilbert in 1928, as www.answers.com informs. “The Entscheidungsproblem asks for a computer program that will take as input a description of a formal language and a mathematical statement in the language and return as output either ‘True’ or ‘False’ according to whether the statement is true or false.”

Turing’s paper had three sections. The first defined the ideas ‘computable number’ and ‘computing machine’; the second posited the concept of ‘universal machine’; and the third used these concepts to prove that Hilbert’s challenge was insoluble.

Like most of Turing’s papers, this paper was marked by ‘a curious blend of humbly phrased, somewhat philosophical speculation and highly technical mathematics,’ writes Leavitt. “One comes away from reading it with the distinct sense that Turing had no clue as to the importance of what he had just done.”

According to Turing, a number could be computed if a machine wrote down its decimal. In the 1930s, no such machine existed, narrates the book. There were “only calculating devices too crude to undertake any complex mathematics, and certainly not programmable.”

He described how the machine would have a tape running through it. The tape was to be divided into squares, each marked with a symbol. “At any moment, only one square can be ‘in the machine’. This square is the ‘scanned square’, while the symbol it bears is the ‘scanned symbol’. The scanned symbol ‘is the only one of which the machine is, so to speak, ‘directly aware’. The machine he thought of could have ‘a finite number of conditions’, which in turn would decide how many of the symbols scanned previously the machine could effectively remember. The gizmo described in ‘Computable Numbers’ came to be called Turing machine.

“It is difficult today to realise how bold an innovation it was to introduce talk about paper tapes and patterns punched into them, into discussions of the foundations of mathematics,” Max Newman would write about Turing. It was just as bold an innovation to talk about ‘states of mind’ in a mathematics paper.

In October 1950, Turing wrote ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, which began with a clear statement of intent, thus: “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think? This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms ‘machine’ and ‘think’…” Turing, however, explained ‘the imitation game’, rather than offering definitions; the game later became known as the Turing test.

Recommended read for those who are not afraid of knowing too much!

CIS is not Commonwealth of Independent States but a multi-billion dollar global IT company.

CIS is not Commonwealth of Independent States, but a multibillion-dollar global information technology company, in The Fourth Order by Stephen Frey ( www.crosswordbookstores.com). CIS is suddenly the target of a hostile takeover.

Moving like ‘a pit bull on steroids’ is Michael Rose, the dynamic CFO of Trafalgar Industries. “If Trafalgar buys us, the entire operation is at risk. Rose will figure out what we’re up to,” fears Peter Beck, executive director of The Fourth Order of Immunity (I-4). He alerts Bill Granger, the CEO of CIS: “And the money trails? They lead straight to you, straight to whatever the hell you do with all that information Spyder gins up. Might take Rose a few months to sniff it out, but he’ll get to the bottom of it.”

I-4, or The Order, is ‘an ultra-secret shadow government agency… founded by high-level administration officials in reaction to the assassination of President Lincoln,’ teases the dust jacket. “The Order had always been sanctioned to manage national security at all costs, by any and all means, without consequences. But behind the sleek veneer of CIS Technologies, the fourth and newest incarnation of The Order not only maintains the ultimate nationwide surveillance and intelligence gathering system but conducts officially licensed covert operations…”

Project Spyder is the code name for a crack team of IT specialists that monitors every financial transaction in the world, narrates Frey. The team uses ‘a massive super computer… buried in a remote CIS location… armed with the most powerful detection software ever built.’ What does Spyder do? It traces “deposits, withdrawals, and transfers made at thousands and thousands of bank branches around the world on a daily basis. As everyone in the intelligence community knew, if you followed the money long enough, ultimately you found the criminals.”

At the board meeting in Trafalgar, Rose talks about how ‘the sizzle’ in the CIS deal would be the benefits CIS brought to the existing business units. “Their advanced IT products will make Trafalgar’s energy and manufacturing divisions much more efficient and competitive, as well as enable us to access an entirely new huge customer, the federal government. CIS is deeply entrenched inside many of the large government agencies that could be big buyers of our products…” The going price for CIS is $3 billion, the board learns. And Trafalgar already had a loan approved for the purpose from Citibank…

For a speed-read.

Tailpiece

“I can check email with the right hand while brushing my teeth with the left!”

“And what about the feet?”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

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