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Christos Papadimitriou : Turing : A Novel about Computation

I can safely say that I have never read a novel by an author whose other works include books such as Combinatorial Optimization: Algorithms and Complexity, one of Papadimitriou’s other works. He is first and foremost a computer scientist though has written a couple of novels.

Were you to see this book in a bookshop, you might assume that it was a book about Alan Turing, the computery/AI pioneer. While he certainly makes an appearance in this book, the name Turing is used for what we would now call a generative AI. It appears on the computer screen of one of the main characters and gives him information on various topics, as we shall see.

There are two main characters in addition to Turing. The first is Alexandros, a fifty-eight year old Greek archaeologist, specialising in the technology of ancient Greece. He also likes women, regularly falling passionately in love and then, soon moving on. He has three daughters and two ex-wives.

Ethel is American, with an English mother and American father. She is a top computer scientist, whose company Exegesis has created a relevance searching engine. Her father, whom everyone, Ethel included, called Rusty died when the plane he was piloting ran out of fuel. Her mother, Dorothy, is a politician. The novel is set sometime in the future when politicians are becoming increasingly redundant, with countries run by the Net, about which we know relatively little. Ethel has a long affair with a Spanish woman she called Sola though as we shall also discover, there are two Solas, a real one and a fake one. As we shall see, not everyone is who they seem to be in this book.

Ethel had consulted The Bad Girl’s Guide to the Greek Isles as she wanted to spend some time there and, incidentally, meet a Greek god. Corfu was recommended for her needs. In a café she sees an older man with a girl and assumes Lolita and Humbert Humbert. It turns out to be Alexandros with one of his daughters. He has learned English by reading Marxist texts in English translations and listening to rock music – Gramsci and the Sex Pistols.

They start an affair. Ethel became for him the only woman in the world. Beautiful and intelligent. She seems to feel the same. All seems to be well and then she suddenly disappears.He does not know what has happened but we do as she heads home to Dorothy – pregnant. She tells Dorothy why she has abandoned the father of her child. Her mother is not convinced.

Ethel has an alter ego – her late father. Masquerading as Rusty she flies to the Colony where she will have an affair with Sola, not the real one. This is all a bit complicated till Ethel reveal herself and the fausse Sola turns out to be a persona created by Ian Frost, known as he King of the runners, which seems to be something like a hacker.
While this is going on Alexandros is engaging with Turing. Turing is not ChatGPT. Firstly it is not always available, Secondly it has something of an attitude. It tells Alexandros about the history of ideas, science, maths and so on, going back to early to early times and then how computers work. It responds to his comments and questions.

Alexandros, as mentioned, is interested in ancient technology and that comes up as does his concern that that more than twenty-five million people lived in the Mediterranean during the third century B.C. and we know very little about them as few written documents were left behind and moreover many of their languages have disappeared. Alexandros wants to give them a voice.

Turing comes and goes according to its whims. On one occasion Akexandros is accompanied by his sixteen year old daughter Aloé and she is more of a match for Turing than her father. They get very much into mathematical theory and discuss the idea whether all mathematical problems can be solved or whether some are inherently unsolvable. While they are doing this Ian Frost who is now very much partners with Ethel, hacks in and joins the conversation and they now move to a discussion on the theory of life, i.e. what is life and how do you define it. Of course that leads on to a discussion od death, with Turing telling what it is like: it’s most unpleasant. Remember when the mass is over, and the man in the black robe puts out the candles one by one? It’s very much like this. Except the candles are in your brain.

We are then on to cryptography and, inevitably, AI. We get a history of AI, much of which, of course is fictional covering the AI Winter ( when AI went out of fashion) and neural nets to, inevitably the Turing test, with an interesting discussion on how to fool an AI into giving itself away and Alexandros and Turing trying to fool Ethel.

The author concludes the book by saying This is a book about love—and about the unique act of love that we call teaching and then oddly concludes with an online discussion, featuring many people commenting and criticising the book, both the love story and the various subjects the book covers from bad girls in Greece to number theory.

It is very much an odd book. It is, I suppose, a novel as there is a story but there is a lot is about Turing telling us a host of fascinating i pieces of information on a host of mainly, though not exclusively, technical subjects, particularly in the fields of computers, AI and maths. Most of it I found most interesting. I suspect not everyone will agree.

Publishing history

First published in 2005 by MIT Press