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Title: Automata by V. David Hopkin ISBN: 0-333-15398-7 Publisher: Macmillan Pub. Date: 1976 Format: Unknown Binding

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: What does "computable" mean?
Comment: This book begins easily enough, but then quickly goes into the usual formal shorthand notation that I call 'computerize'. However maybe this book is less forbidding than the later and still popular texts on computability. Cantor's diagonal argument is presented as an appendix, and other appendices provide mini-biographies of the main contributors to computability theory. Although the book is titled "Automata", no biography of von Neumann is presented (see "Prisoner's Dilemma" by Poundstone). Degrees of complexity are not defined in Hopkin and Moss. Von Neumann's original qualitative definition of complexity is given in "Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata", which is about complexity. Actually, for a clearer and more up to date discussion of automata, maybe one should read Marvin Minsky's "Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines", which also is not completely daunting in appearance.

I pieced together my incomplete understanding of computability more by reading various old papers, and by talking with my mathematician colleague Julian Palmore, than from a single text.