716,742 research outputs found
The Turing Guide
This volume celebrates the various facets of Alan Turing (1912ā1954), the British
mathematician and computing pioneer, widely considered as the father of computer
science. It is aimed at the general reader, with additional notes and references for those
who wish to explore the life and work of Turing more deeply.
The book is divided into eight parts, covering different aspects of Turingās life and
work.
Part I presents various biographical aspects of Turing, some from a personal point of
view.
Part II presents Turingās universal machine (now known as a Turing machine), which
provides a theoretical framework for reasoning about computation. His 1936 paper on this
subject is widely seen as providing the starting point for the field of theoretical computer
science.
Part III presents Turingās working on codebreaking during World War II. While the War
was a disastrous interlude for many, for Turing it provided a nationally important outlet
for his creative genius. It is not an overstatement to say that without Turing, the War
would probably have lasted longer, and may even have been lost by the Allies. The
sensitive nature of Turningās wartime work meant that much of this has been revealed
only relatively recently.
Part IV presents Turingās post-War work on computing, both at the National Physical
Laboratory and at the University of Manchester. He made contributions to both hardware
design, through the ACE computer at the NPL, and software, especially at Manchester.
Part V covers Turingās contribution to machine intelligence (now known as Artificial
Intelligence or AI). Although Turing did not coin the term, he can be considered a
founder of this field which is still active today, authoring a seminal paper in 1950.
Part VI covers morphogenesis, Turingās last major scientific contribution, on the
generation of seemingly random patterns in biology and on the mathematics behind such
patterns. Interest in this area has increased rapidly in recent times in the field of
bioinformatics, with Turingās 1952 paper on this subject being frequently cited.
Part VII presents some of Turingās mathematical influences and achievements. Turing
was remarkably free of external influences, with few co-authors ā Max Newman was an
exception and acted as a mathematical mentor in both Cambridge and Manchester.
Part VIII considers Turing in a wider context, including his influence and legacy to
science and in the public consciousness.
Reflecting Turingās wide influence, the book includes contributions by authors from
a wide variety of backgrounds. Contemporaries provide reminiscences, while there are
perspectives by philosophers, mathematicians, computer scientists, historians of science,
and museum curators. Some of the contributors gave presentations at Turing Centenary
meetings in 2012 in Bletchley Park, Kingās College Cambridge, and Oxford University,
and several of the chapters in this volume are based on those presentations ā some
through transcription of the original talks, especially for Turingās contemporaries, now
aged in their 90s. Sadly, some contributors died before the publication of this book, hence
its dedication to them.
For those interested in personal recollections, Chapters 2, 3, 11, 12, 16, 17, and 36
will be of interest. For philosophical aspects of Turingās work, see Chapters 6, 7, 26ā31,
and 41. Mathematical perspectives can be found in Chapters 35 and 37ā39. Historical
perspectives can be found in Chapters 4, 8, 9, 10, 13ā15, 18, 19, 21ā25, 34, and 40. With
respect to Turingās body of work, the treatment in Parts IIāVI is broadly chronological.
We have attempted to be comprehensive with respect to all the important aspects of
Turingās achievements, and the book can be read cover to cover, or the chapters can be
tackled individually if desired. There are cross-references between chapters where
appropriate, and some chapters will inevitably overlap.
We hope that you enjoy this volume as part of your library and that you will dip into
it whenever you wish to enter the multifaceted world of Alan Turing
A Survey on Continuous Time Computations
We provide an overview of theories of continuous time computation. These
theories allow us to understand both the hardness of questions related to
continuous time dynamical systems and the computational power of continuous
time analog models. We survey the existing models, summarizing results, and
point to relevant references in the literature
Benchmarks for Parity Games (extended version)
We propose a benchmark suite for parity games that includes all benchmarks
that have been used in the literature, and make it available online. We give an
overview of the parity games, including a description of how they have been
generated. We also describe structural properties of parity games, and using
these properties we show that our benchmarks are representative. With this work
we provide a starting point for further experimentation with parity games.Comment: The corresponding tool and benchmarks are available from
https://github.com/jkeiren/paritygame-generator. This is an extended version
of the paper that has been accepted for FSEN 201
Logical Specification and Analysis of Fault Tolerant Systems through Partial Model Checking
This paper presents a framework for a logical characterisation of fault tolerance and its formal analysis based on partial model checking techniques. The framework requires a fault tolerant system to be modelled using a formal calculus, here the CCS process algebra. To this aim we propose a uniform modelling scheme in which to specify a formal model of the system, its failing behaviour and possibly its fault-recovering procedures. Once a formal model is provided into our scheme, fault tolerance - with respect to a given property - can be formalized as an equational Āµ-calculus formula. This formula expresses in a logic formalism, all the fault scenarios satisfying that fault tolerance property. Such a characterisation understands the analysis of fault tolerance as a form of analysis of open systems and thank to partial model checking strategies, it can be made independent on any particular fault assumption. Moreover this logical characterisation makes possible the fault-tolerance verification problem be expressed as a general Āµ-calculus validation problem, for solving which many theorem proof techniques and tools are available. We present several analysis methods showing the flexibility of our approach
Abstract State Machines 1988-1998: Commented ASM Bibliography
An annotated bibliography of papers which deal with or use Abstract State
Machines (ASMs), as of January 1998.Comment: Also maintained as a BibTeX file at http://www.eecs.umich.edu/gasm
Parameterized Algorithmics for Computational Social Choice: Nine Research Challenges
Computational Social Choice is an interdisciplinary research area involving
Economics, Political Science, and Social Science on the one side, and
Mathematics and Computer Science (including Artificial Intelligence and
Multiagent Systems) on the other side. Typical computational problems studied
in this field include the vulnerability of voting procedures against attacks,
or preference aggregation in multi-agent systems. Parameterized Algorithmics is
a subfield of Theoretical Computer Science seeking to exploit meaningful
problem-specific parameters in order to identify tractable special cases of in
general computationally hard problems. In this paper, we propose nine of our
favorite research challenges concerning the parameterized complexity of
problems appearing in this context
- ā¦