Mathison

by Leela Dutt

2012 is the anniversary of Alan Turing's birth, so this is an excellent time to read Mathison, a rich story of one family throughout the twentieth century, involving an Indian home in Calcutta in 1900 and a Jewish dentist in Nuremberg in the 1930s; Los Angeles, Golders Green and South Wales. The famous Turing Test imagined a computer program so intelligent that it could fool the user into thinking it was human; programmers have not got far with this yet - but this whole novel claims to be written by a computer program addressing a child born in 2000.

206 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1996

About the author

I’ve loved travelling since I lived in Nigeria and Kenya with our small children. I guess I’ve always been something of an outsider, growing up in Golders Green with a kindly Indian father and a loving but strict Danish mother. I’ve lived nearly all my adult life in the same house in Cardiff, married to the philosopher Robin Attfield; we have seven incredible grandchildren, of whom six survive. Robin and I are both Quakers.
After history at Oxford I was briefly a teacher, a shop assistant and a journalist. I then took a degree in computing and set up and managed a database about housing research for Cardiff University before joining the Big Issue Cymru as a proof-reader. My previous published works, all paperbacks, are available on Amazon, with details on my website www.attfieldduttbooks.co.uk and my blog http://leeladutt.wordpress.com. These paperbacks include an affectionate collection of short stories about modern Quakers entitled Kingfisher Blue.
I enjoy writing about people and events that make me laugh…