Turing

While on vacation in China, I read Turing, by Christos Papadimitriou. The author is a computer science professor at Berkeley (whose theory textbooks are widely used), and this book is really a novel for programmers. Overall, it was an interesting read: it does a good job of explaining the many levels of software and hardware that comprise a computer system. As a novel, I was not so convinced: it tried to hard to be learned, the love story was unconvincing, and the basic mystery of how the Turing AI was created was not discussed.