Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Alan Turing was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. In 1935, aged 22, he developed the mathematical theory upon which all subsequent stored-program digital computers are modeled.

At the outbreak of hostilities with Germany in September 1939, he joined the Government Codebreaking team at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire and played a crucial role in deciphering Engima, the code used by the German armed forces to protect their radio communications. Turing's work on the version of Enigma used by the German navy was vital to the battle for supremacy in the North Atlantic. He also contributed to the attack on the cyphers known as "Fish," which were used by the German High Command for the encryption of signals during the latter part of the war. His contribution helped to shorten the war in Europe by an estimated two years.

After the war, his theoretical work led to the development of Britain's first computers at the National Physical Laboratory and the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at Manchester University.

Turing was also a founding father of modern cognitive science, theorizing that the cortex at birth is an "unorganized machine" which through "training" becomes organized "into a universal machine or something like it." He went on to develop the use of computers to model biological growth, launching the discipline now referred to as Artificial Life.

The papers in this book are the key works for understanding Turing's phenomenal contribution across all these fields. The collection includes Turing's declassified wartime "Treatise on the Enigma"; letters from Turing to Churchill and to codebreakers; lectures, papers, and broadcasts which opened up the concept of AI and its implications; and the paper which formed the genesis of the investigation of Artifical Life.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Jack Copeland: Alan Turing 1912-1954
• Jack Copeland: Computable Numbers
• A Guide
• 1 On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidensproblem (1936)
• 2 Alan Turing, Emil Post, and Donald W. Davies
• On Computable Numbers
• Corrections and Critiques
• 3 Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals (1938)
• 4 Letters on Logic to Max Newman (c. 1940)
• Jack Copeland
• Enigma
• 5 Patrick Mahon
• History of Hut 8 to December 1941 (1845)
• 6 Bombe and Spider (1940)
• 7 Letter to Winston Churchill (1941)
• 8 Memorandum to OP-20-G on Naval Enigma (c. 1941)
• Jack Copeland: Artificial Intelligence
• 9 Lecture on the Automatic Computing Machine (1947)
• 10 Intelligent Machinery (1948)
• 11 Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)
• 12 Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory (c. 1951)
• 13 Can Digital Computers Think?
• 14 Alan Turing, Richard Braithwaite, Geoffrey Jefferson, and Max Newman
• Can Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said to Think? (1952)
• Jack Copeland
• Artificial Life
• 15 The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis (1952)
• 16 Chess (1953)
• 17 Solvable and Unsolvable Problems (1954)