f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe [Author] George Dyson [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2012/09/06 [Review] 
Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Dyson digs up all sorts of quotable lines and anecdotes and biographical details, many genuinely new to me. I enjoyed those greatly. For these I give it 4 stars. On the other hand… He is obsessed with Von Neumann’s IAS/MANIAC, to the detriment of the rest of the book. The pre-WWII history is OK but signally fails to explain things like the Hilbert program, Goedel or Turing’s actual halting theorem. Someone who read this expecting to understand ‘Turing’s cathedral’ would be vastly better served reading a book like Hofstadter’s Goedel, Escher, Bach (as old as it is). Instead, countless pages are taken up with detailed technical information that is simultaneously in depth and also poorly explained. I repeatedly got the feeling that Dyson is indulging in that common temptation, allocating material based on how much effort it took to find, not what would inform the reader - he went through a lot of work documenting MANIAC and the rest of us must enjoy (suffer) the fruits of it. I felt that if I didn’t already know a great deal of this material, I would be completely lost inside the book; I wonder how much other people could get out of it. The repeated analogies to search engines and modern computing come off very poorly (search engines are analogue? Oookkaayyy….); much could have been said about how modern chip architectures and cloud computing designs are not very Von Neumannian now, so here again I wonder if it’s a forced attempt to show contemporary relevance or perhaps just influence from his Google visit. Other parts make one question how much Dyson understands: he links Goedelian/Turing incompleteness to computer viruses and concludes with grand ’90s-esque visions (pace Kevin Kelly’s old Out of Control book) of viruses spreading out through the Internet and beating on the walls of clean computers - but viruses aren’t really a problem these days, nothing like they used to be, and the situation seems apt to only improve! Like spam, the solutions are not perfect and require a great deal of manpower & cleverness, but they are working and currently seem likely to steadily improve; this wouldn’t be a surprise to him if he had really appreciated that Goedelian/Turing-incompleteness implies that there are large decidable subsets of programs and we can build our systems out of those. (Every programmer who uses a language with a decent type system is doing something a naive understanding of incompleteness says is impossible: he’s executing nontrivial predicates over his program.) For those reasons and others, this will never get 5 stars from me, and if there were a 3.5 stars, I’d go with that.
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