Epstein Secrets

more complex than they first appear. They are infinite, yet there are different infinities, and they have meaning. The smallpox example above and the Turing numbers we will discover shortly suggest numbers do have meaning independent of culture and language. The next two chapters will show us what happens

away their secrets. The Enigma machine was an elegant compromise between a truly unbreakable code and a simple cipher. Unfortunately for the Germans, Turing was on the side of the Allies. In the 1930s almost all mathematics, accounting, and code-breaking were performed by humans using pencil and paper. I

computing machine: the forerunner of all modern computers. At the time, only a handful people in the world could assess Turing’s paper. One of them, Alonzo Church, was based at the Institute of Advanced Mathematics in the USA on the Princeton University campus, next door to the Institute for Advanced Study that

a topic absent from a typical computer-science education: the physical configuration of a 118 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016921 computation. Von Neumann and Turing posed their questions as theoretical studies, because it was beyond the technology of their day to realize them. But with the convergence of communic

ce in terms of feedback, exploring the cultural rather than engineering uptake of this idea. She begins with primary readings by Wiener, Shannon, and Turing and then pivots from the scientists and engineers to the work and ideas of artists, feminists, postmodern theorists. Her goal: to come up with a new

t was constraining to cybernetics was the presumption of an analogy of structure between the controller and the controlled. By the 1930s, Kurt Gédel, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing had all described universal systems of computation, in which the computation required no structural analogy to functions that were c

a topic absent from a typical computer-science education: the physical configuration of a 118 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016338 computation. Von Neumann and Turing posed their questions as theoretical studies, because it was beyond the technology of their day to realize them. But with the convergence of communic

ce in terms of feedback, exploring the cultural rather than engineering uptake of this idea. She begins with primary readings by Wiener, Shannon, and Turing and then pivots from the scientists and engineers to the work and ideas of artists, feminists, postmodern theorists. Her goal: to come up with a new

t was constraining to cybernetics was the presumption of an analogy of structure between the controller and the controlled. By the 1930s, Kurt Gédel, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing had all described universal systems of computation, in which the computation required no structural analogy to functions that were c