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A good general information site is: http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/
Back in a first year philosophy paper I did, we used Artificial Intelligence by Jack Copeland, which was a fairly good introductory level book on aritificial intelligence, including turing machines, if I remember correctly. (and there was a more advanced book, The Essential Turing, also by Jack Copeland, that is a collection of Turing's essays and other works with full introductions.)
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Here's a link to the text book I used in my computability and complexity class.
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Theory-Computation-Second-Michael/dp/0534950973
I found it to be quite good, and not too difficult to understand. Ideally though, you would take a class on this stuff.
Edit: Hmm, maybe you could give a little bit of your background, so that it's easier to gauge what level of material you're looking for?
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I learned about it about 4 years ago in COMP sci and application, but I don't remember much ):
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On September 04 2008 10:06 Slithe wrote:Here's a link to the text book I used in my computability and complexity class. http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Theory-Computation-Second-Michael/dp/0534950973I found it to be quite good, and not too difficult to understand. Ideally though, you would take a class on this stuff. Edit: Hmm, maybe you could give a little bit of your background, so that it's easier to gauge what level of material you're looking for?
I REALLY like this book. When the author introduces a topic, he will give both a formal proof and a conceptual understanding of the proof as well, which makes understanding things like proving uncomputability by reduction much easier.
Then again, I took this class as a 3rd year computer science major with a background in algorithm analysis, discreet math, and formal languages/automata theory, so the content might be a tad bit over your head, not sure what you're looking for.
If you are interested in basic computatibility theory, it's wise to start by learning formal languages and automata stuff first... here's a textbook on the topic which I've heard is good: http://www.jbpub.com/catalog/9780763737986/ The other book actually covers the same topics in the introductory chapters... but in like 30 pages and with less explanations and examples. I'm glad you have an interest in Turing machines. It's fun and quite satisfying to break computation down into models and prove that certain problems are impossible to solve in our universe.
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