Faster Than Thought. A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines.

Turing on chess. First edition, first impression of 'the most widely read early English introduction to electronic computing', containing one of the last works published by Alan Turing (Norman, Origins of Cyberspace 504). Uncommon in the dust jacket.

Editor Bertram Vivian Bowden (1910-1989) was a Cambridge educated physicist who made significant contributions to the development of radar during the Second World War. He then worked for the Ferranti Corporation, which developed the first commercially available computer, the Ferranti Mark I, in 1951. 'Bowden was particularly effective in explaining, with uncanny prescience, the dramatic effect that the digital computer was destined to have (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

Faster Than Thought includes pieces on the history of computing and case studies of contemporary computers operating in Europe and North America. The extensive section on future applications includes articles on crystallography, meteorology, ballistics, engineering, government calculations, commerce, astronomy, and games, most notably a chapter on teaching computers to play chess, to which Alan Turing was a major contributor.

Turing's algorithm was tested against Grandmaster Gary Kasparov during celebrations of the former's 100th birthday in June 2012. Though he beat the computer in sixteen moves, Kasparov described Turing's programme as 'an incredible achievement... Although it's only thinking two moves ahead, I would have thought it would give the amateur player some serious problems. Alan Turing is one of the very few people about who you could say that if he had lived longer the world would be a different place' (Manchester University website).

First edition; 8vo; frontispiece and 16 plates of which 2 are folding, contents fresh; original buff cloth, titles to spine gilt, spine and edges of boards a little toned, lightly rubbed at the extremities, a very good copy in the price-clipped and rubbed jacket with tanned spine panel and a few small chips and short closed tears, housed in a brown cloth slipcase; 416pp.