Who is Jack Copeland?

Jack Copeland is a Professor of Philosophy at University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. He is also the Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing.

Dr. Copeland is the author of several books on Alan Turing. One of these books, The Essential Turing (Oxford University Press, 2013), was particularly useful to me as I was building this website. In particular, it has, on pages 103-124, an article by Donald Davies entitled Corrections to Turing's Universal Computing Machine. It is here that Davies reveals all of the corrections that he found that need to be made to Alan Turing's Universal Turing Machine before it can run on a real computer. What I also found fascinating was Davies' narration, on the first page of his article, of how irritated Alan Turing was when he asked him about them.

This book also contains many other articles, papers, and letters, pertaining to Alan Turing. For example, it includes the famous paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem in which Alan Turing described the machine that became known as the Turing Machine, and the famous paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence in which Alan Turing proposed "The Imitation Game" which in time became commonly known as the "Turing Test." In fact, this book essentially has everything written by Turing, and some important articles written by others about Turing.