A Bad Start That Becomes An Amazing Read

books:

	• A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines Janna Levin Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
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fair play must be given to the machine

If the mention of Turing machines in the title of a novel caught your eye, chances are you've at least passing familiarity with Turing and his importance to the fields of computing theory and artificial intelligence.

One reason I work in the field of computing is I'm fascinated by the idea of giving the illusion of intelligence - and as Turing points out, if that's successful enough to convince a human, how can we call it an illusion when that's the only standard by which we judge each other?

I've applied the idea not only to programming but to life - I don't consider myself a highly intelligent person but I use what I have to convince people I am intelligent when I need to.

It's like.. let's say you have a job interview that requires some specialized knowledge and you prep as much as you can the day before. Now you luck out because the interviewer asks you a finite number of questions and you can parrot or improvise just enough to make him believe you know the subject. You know as much as he asked and you explained it to his satisfaction in your own words. You walk away from the interview thinking maybe you do "understand" it - at least to his satisfaction. Similarly if a machine is intelligent enough to fool a human, how else are we to judge its intelligence?

But as other reviewers have pointed out, this book is more about the emotional life of Godel and Turing than an exposition of their interrelated ideas. Turing's importance to computing and to breaking German cyphers during World War 2 and Godel's importance to maths and the idea of undecidability are almost a footnote to the attempt to capture how it all felt to them - most every other book on either of these guys does it the other way around, and the author is clear from the beginning about where she wants to focus.

It's a legitimate goal and a worthy read.

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A Bad Start That Becomes An Amazing Read

Although Levin is an amazing physicist, her first foray into the world of literary fiction is, on first read, not so amazing. That said, the subject matter of her novel is more than fascinating and so, the fact that her storytelling and craftsmanship as a writer is more than lacking at the beginning of the book, the story sells itself as a tour de force in its fictionalization of the lives of two geniuses who struggle with a deep awkwardness with life.
At the beginning of the book the prose is almost a torture to read: some times overwrought,
'While they continue to play an anomalously quiet game, the pit of dread is jostled and falls deep into the fertile gastrointestinal soil where it begins its life cycle. Will it fester as an ulcer, or blossom into rancid abnormal cells? That depends on how each chooses to tend that messy garden';
and at other times over the top,
'The iron frame of Kurt's bed was a brutal conductor of the chill singeing his hand so sharply as he hoisted himself awake this morning that it might as well have left a burn, and the cloud of condensation that escaped from his damp mouth could have been smoke'.
The narration changes from past tense to present tense in the same paragraph! While her prose changes drastically for the better midway through the book, this irritating tendency to write a single scene as happening in the past as well as in the present continues unabated.
But, amazingly, halfway into the book it seems as if another Levin is writing the book. A Levin who is confident in her craft and skilled in turning a single moment of the story into a soaring monument of poetry. What happened! Whatever happened it happened for the better. Levin takes command of her themes and infuses them into poetic states throughout the character's events. The most striking example of the preceding can be found on pages 138-9. Levin takes an ambitious but dangerous chance at explaining the event that informs a young Wittgenstein's philosophy. While she humbly admits that this something of Wittgenstein is the unspeakable that 'we must pass over in silence' from his Tractatus, she dares to speak to that silence and she actually makes it reveal itself to the reader.
The moments like that in the story pay of with dividends which have the effect of apologizing for the early writing of an amateur.

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