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Life outside the computer science lab:
Christos Papadimitriou, novelist
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Greek native Papadmitriou
wrote Turing (A Novel About Computation) in English.
A friend translated it into Greek as the pages were produced.
Papadimitriou is currently in conversation with a screenwriter
for a possible film version of the book.
BART NAGEL PHOTO
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One day in 1999, Professor Christos Papadimitriou left a movie
theater in Greece, blinded with a flash of inspiration. He had
just watched a biography of one of his favorite Greek poets, Constantine
P. Cavafy. The film, Papadimitriou says, was just so-so. But the
idea of creating a narrative honoring the life of a great thinker
appealed to the computer scientist. A book cover appeared in his
mind’s eye: Papadimitriou imagined a fantastical homage
to Alan Turing, the brilliant English mathematician and founder
of modern computer science who took his own life in 1954.
"I wrote the first chapter on the plane ride back to Berkeley,"
says Papadimitriou, who had never produced a word of fiction before.
But he kept writing, every morning from seven to nine, for two
years. And now, Turing (A Novel About Computation) is
a reality. Following a first publication in Greek as To Hamogelo
tou Turing, translated as Turing’s Smile,
the novel hit bookstore shelves in the United States last summer.
Published by MIT Press, Turing (A Novel About Computation),
is a love story set in the near future. "The basic plot begins
with boy meets girl, girl leaves boy, boy is inconsolable,"
he says. From there, the surreal tale truly begins to unfold.
While searching for his love via the Internet, the protagonist
stumbles on a computer program called Turing that can communicate
in English. The man and the machine become immersed in a poetic
conversation about life, love, math, death, and immortality. The
program embodies one of Turing’s best known ideas, the Turing
Test, a game in which a human interrogates another human and a
computer via text messages without knowing which is which. If
the person could not distinguish the computer from the human,
the computer would be deemed intelligent.
"In some sense in the book, the program is actually Alan
Turing," Papadamitriou says.
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a young man, Papadimtriou played piano in jazz and rock
bands. Most recently, he and Donald Knuth played a classical
piano piece for four hands during a ceremony at a University
of Macedonia computer science conference. The two were in
Thesoliniki to accept honorary doctorates bestowed by the
university.
BART NAGEL PHOTO
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Currently, Papadimitriou is collaborating with his friend and
best-selling Greek author Apostolos Doxiadis and several illustrators
on another unusual literary project. Logicomix is a graphic
novel about the authors’ joint quest to understand the lives
of the great mathematical logicians of the twentieth century.
"We are trying to come to grips with the strange fact that
most of them died in psychiatric hospitals," Papadimitriou
says. Studying the triumphs and failures of the logicians who
came before him informs Papadimitriou’s work in the laboratory.
He applies algorithmic and complexity theory to the Internet.
The broad intent is to understand how Internet growth relates
to congestion and the overall health of the massively complex
system.
"The Internet is the first artifact that computer scientists
must study in ways similar to how scientists study the brain or
cells," he says. "The Internet is not a finished product.
At the next technological fork in the road, we need to have some
insight into how to improve it." Turing would indeed be smiling.
"Writing fiction is not unlike my work with mathematics and
computers," Papadamitriou says. "With both, everything
has to fit together. The plot of a novel is very much like a mathematical
proof."
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