December 2011
Beginner
240 pages
6h 45m
English
Content preview from The Universal Computer
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CHAPTER 7
Turing Conceives of the
All-Purpose Computer
As early as 1834, Charles Babbage had conceived of an automatic calculat-
ing machine, his proposed but never constructed analytical engine, intended
to carry out numerical computations of the most varied kind.
∗
To empha-
size the power and scope of his engine, Babbage remarked facetiously that
“it could do everything but compose country dances.”
1
While for Babbage,
it was self-evident that machines designed for computation could not be ex-
pected to compose dances, it does not strike us today as being at all out of
the question. In fact, today’s computers can perfectly well be programmed
to compose ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.