TY  - BOOK
AU  - Dyson, George
TI  - Turing's cathedral : : the origins of the digital universe
SN  - 9780375422775 (hb)
U1  - 004.09  
PY  - 2012///
CY  - New York	
PB  - Pantheon Books	
KW  - Turing machines	
KW  - Random access memory	
KW  - Computable functions
N2  - "It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things—and our universe would never be the same.
 
Using five kilobytes of memory (the amount allocated to displaying the cursor on a computer desktop of today), they achieved unprecedented success in both weather prediction and nuclear weapons design, while tackling, in their spare time, problems ranging from the evolution of viruses to the evolution of stars."
ER  -