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The decoding operation at Bletchley Park became the basis for the new decoding and intelligence work at GCHQ. With the cold war this became an important operation and Turing continued to work for GCHQ, although his Manchester colleagues were totally unaware of this. After his conviction, his security clearance was withdrawn. Worse than that, security officers were now extremely worried that someone with complete knowledge of the work going on at GCHQ was now labelled a security risk. He had many foreign colleagues, as any academic would, but the police began to investigate his foreign visitors. A holiday which Turing took in Greece in 1953 caused consternation among the security officers.

Turing died of potassium cyanide poisoning while conducting electrolysis experiments. The cyanide was found on a half eaten apple beside him. An inquest concluded that it was self-administered but his mother always maintained that it was an accident.

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Turing.html

http://www.turing.org.uk/bio/part1.html

Programming duplicated cores is just a very specific case of parallel programming that is being promoted those days because, we are not able to keep making faster chips as we were some years ago.

Parallel programming/machinery is a much broader field, read Turing's papers for a great insight at how different computers could have been. Unfortunately 'Von Newman designs' success stalled the industry in our actual computer architecture that was not designed to do parallel computations.

Alan Turing nearly qualified for the Marathon in the 1948 Olympics. One could argue that he was also the world's first sysadmin.

A better example of British IT: http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

Of course, the Turing Police ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Police ) are on the job now but the British police and the British in general were the idiots in the 1950's. Hmmm ...

But to be fair, the police did arrest Alan Turing for being gay. So it all works out in the end.

Alan Turing's colleague Jack Good, however, said on the same television programme that if the security authorities had known about Alan Turing's homosexuality from the beginning, 'we might have lost the war.'

"not sure I agree with Turing as an example at all in your explanation"

You call yourself a genius and yet you can't recognise the simplicity and elegance in Turing's Universal computing machine. A genius is distinguished by their ability to see what is right under everyones noses, spacetime, evolution, gravity, ect. As another poster pointed out art, music and litrature all have geniuses who can communicate deep concepts across cultures and time. A "genius" of cheap DVD technology cannot even hope to be seen alongside that kind of brilliance.

Everything is predictable scientifically. It's just that there's too many variables to do it practically.

What is this, 1792?

I think this isn't true anymore

As I posted elsewhere, Penrose needs to be taken VERY seriously. This is plain in Andrew Hodges' [Turing's biographer] extremely interesting lecture on Turing's struggles with the same problems that Penrose points out in ENM.

Turing and Penrose.

Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing's biographer, has a really good lecture he's shopping around the p[lanet about how Turing was deeply worried about exactly the same things that Penrose worries about [and those of us interested in consciousness and artificial intelligence, should also be worried about]...let's see if I can find it...

Yes, here it is: Turing and Penrose.

Bill Gates recieving such an honour by riding the coat-tails of an entire corporation does seem to dilute the prestige of the honor a bit doesn't it. Especialy considering they left Alan Turing to rot amidst charges of homosexuality, after doing as much as any single person to save the world as we know it, and basicaly founding the very industry gates was honored for advancing.

Decades of work has indicated more than three ways to make QM compatible with GR, including: string theory (AKA M-theory), twistors, and loop quantum gravity (LQG). However, it is suspected by some that, just like St. Patrick would tell us, these three are actually different facets of the same underlying reality. (Just like different interpretations of QM don't actually produce different predictions.)

If you'd done it once, I'd just assume that it was a typo and not worry about it. But since you did it twice, it's likely you really don't know.

It's a Turing machine, not a Turin machine. It's named after Alan Turing.

The real story

There are photos of his statue here and here. Having seen these, I think I should go and see it in person some day.

Turing buried some silver bars for safekeeping during the war, but forgot where he buried them.

If you care to read then feel free to look: here,the official biography if you don't know a lot about alan turing, just thought it would come in handy for some people. And, he definitely did make some decent contributions to our world. Who knows what our world would be like without him, some of his contributions to code / code breaking were very important, read the short biography on the site above, it can't hurt.

He was, in fact, homosexual.

Don't forget Turing's Bombes, which ran at Bletchley park deciphering intercepted German signals (see http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/scrapbook/ww2.html ).
Of course, the real father of programmable computing was Tommy Flowers, who seems to have been largely forgotten.

Dunstan

India, on the other hand, appears to have contributed precisely jack shit to all of this, and it's very understandable that they're going to want to want a piece of the pie now that they can just go buy a book and pirate a copy of windows XP and take advantage of the American computer revolution.

The computer was invented by a Brit and a Hungarian.

Until those fscking American thiefs stole it, that is.

( /sarcasm )

Thomas Miconi

the man with one of the strongest claims to the title of Father of Modren Computing
There are two people with stronger claims: Alan Turing, who laid the theoretical foundations, and Konrad Zuse, who built the first digital computer.

Or how's about John Maynard Keynes, the economist? Anthony Burgess' _Earthly Powers_ has a very funny running joke about how many of the greatest and most serious thinkers of the twentieth century were gay (or non-straight, in any one of a number of ways).

An excellent biography of Turing that explicitly deals with the significance of his sexual outlaw status is Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma. Makes one think of the expression "the backroom boys" in an altogether different way.

I don't think that Turing wanted to be a "sexual outlaw", by the way - obviously he'd have preferred it if the authorities had simply left him alone - but there is a subversive, anti-authoritarian streak in him which has some of its roots in the British gay culture of his times. An often overlooked aspect of the Turing Test is the stipulation that the human participants must also pretend to be something they're not - namely a member of the opposite sex...

Why is this flamebait? Turing *was* gay.

If it was "built at the same time during the second world war," then they weren't built any sooner than 1939. If they weren't built any sooner than 1939, then one John Vincent Atanasoff had been working on a computer for two years. According to this page, the Colussus was built in 1943-1945, which means it was started a year after the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was finished.

And before anyone brings up the ENIAC, Honeywell Inc. vs. Sperry Rand Corp. overturned the patent due to prior art from the ABC.

Tragically, both the Colussus and Atanasoff-Berry computer have been destroyed. The Colussus because it was top secret, and the Atanasoff-Berry because Atanasoff was convinced the standard door size was 36", when they're actually 33". It was dismantled to free up office space.

he Fab Four's label, and - according to legend - the appleinspiration for the name Jobs and Woz gave their kit computer

I heard the apple of Apple came from the story of Alan Turing's suicide.

Yes, a Turing Test is named after Alan Turning who had certain theories about AI, an automatic Turning test is becoming a common sight on the internet.

Also, I found another one in my previous message -"thier" is really spelled "their".

Yes, a Turing Test is named after Alan Turning who had certain theories about AI, an automatic Turning test is becoming a common sight on the internet.

Also, I found another one in my previous message -"thier" is really spelled "their".

That doesn't however make it impossible to create a machine which is at least as good as a human at translating...

I believe you are referring to the Turing test, or at least something close to it. Do that, and you have created (arguably) true artificial intelligence. I for one welcome our... ah screw it.

The life of Alan Turing somewhat ironically illustrates the idea that the article conveys better than any other case that I can think of in science. Tried and convicted for homosexual activity in Manchester in the middle of the last century at the age of fourty-one, Turing's sentence consisted of estrogen injections which were meant to quell his libido. This was essentially the end of what had been a very productive life. Two years later, he apparently committed suicide. The cause of death: poisoning by a cyanide-laced apple.

Now, Turing has some claim to being the very first computer scientist. His attempts to explain mathematical logic in terms of mechanistic abstractions predates the computer revolution by a couple of decades. And when actual computers did start to appear, he was one of the first to deal seriously with what we now call software.

For details of Turing's life, I heartily recommend Andrew Hodges's biography.

But here's another bummer. It seems pretty obvious that the security bozos murdered Turing because they couldn't stand the idea of faggot with all those state secrets in his head. I should emphasize that this is my paranoid theory, not Hodges's -- as a UK citizen, he could get in trouble just for suggesting the possibility.

So what's new?

Alan Turing designed the random number generator instruction for the Ferranti Mark 1 around 1950.

(Or is this an entry for the oldest Slashdot reposting competition, just 53 years late?)

With the exception of Donald Knuth, all of the names you list are of people who had mostly engineering contributions, as opposed to bringing scientific advancements in the field (although the two are somewhat related). Did you mean to exclude the people who created and formalized computer science? If not, then you most definitely want to include Alan Turing, Edsger Dijsktra, C. Antony R. Hoare, Niklaus Wirth, and Marvin Minsky.

I'd hate to think that computer power didn't increase between the time of Turing's death in 1954, and 2000....

Pretty much any prediction that Turing could make about computers nearly 50 years after his death - and before the advent of transistors - would pure speculation. The fact that Turing's prediction that AIs would be indistinguishable from people in the "Turing test" was wrong, and that other projects based on sheer informational density (such as CYC) have been dismal failures, indicate that it is the purely scripted/explicit logical constraint strategy of solving this problem that is faulty. Unfortunately, the 30 years after that prediction have focused pretty much entirely on scripting and logical constraints, and other methods of artificial/computational intelligence didn't see the light of day until the 80s and 90s.

Be sure to watch further developments in modeling of neurological processes, as there is still hope along this avenue of research :)

How about this:
Tim Berners-Lee - invented the web
Alan Turing - pioneer in computing
Stephen Hawking - international physics genius

...to name but a few. All British...
Not lessening the acheivements of the USA, but get some world perspective! This is exactly why so many Brits get pissed at so many Americans.
And Einstein (German) had a reasonably large involvement in the development of atom bomb physics.

I imagine it would look something like this but with flames shooting out.

> Nazi Germany gave us advances in physics (via rocketry) and mathematics (encryption).
I think more advances in mathematics were due to decryption (the field in which a little know guy by the name of Alan Turing really made his mark on the war). But I guess you could argue quite reasonably that it was a consequence of encryption.
Oh, and don't forget the advances in weapons of mass destruction.

I agree; and the fact that he way gay probably had somthing to do with that. I think thats a shame, romance and gay still don't mix in Hollywood's minds.

I agree - the film makers were looking for a way to turn the story of the Bletchley Park codebreakers into a romance, so "obviously" the leading man had to go after the girl. It is a shame.

There was a play on Turing though.BREAKING THE CODE [turing.org.uk] I allways wanted to see it. Derek Jacobi rocks!

I was lucky enough to see Jacobi in Breaking the Code when I lived in the UK. He was, indeed, excellent as AMT. I was also lucky enough to meet Robin Gandy who was one of Turning's students and a major mathematician in his own right. Its a crime that Turing was harried into an early suicide; we can only wonder what he might have achieved if he had lived.

Not into this film; but there was a play and a "television movie" staring Derek Jacobi. Breaking the Code

I agree; and the fact that he way gay probably had somthing to do with that. I think thats a shame, romance and gay still don't mix in Hollywood's minds.

There was a play on Turing though.BREAKING THE CODE I allways wanted to see it. Derek Jacobi rocks!

BTW I own a first addition American of the Hodges book.

I agree; and the fact that he way gay probably had somthing to do with that. I think thats a shame, romance and gay still don't mix in Hollywood's minds.

There was a play on Turing though.BREAKING THE CODE I allways wanted to see it. Derek Jacobi rocks!

Mate, Turing complete. As in, Alan Turing. As in the father of computing.

http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/

interestingly enough, there is also a play and a movie called breaking the code, about the life of alan turing. the author of the book you mention had a hand in its creation.

the role of turing was played by derek jacobi, famous for his title role in i, claudius. the movie made for the bbc is also available on tape.

Much more information about Alan Turing and the book is on the web page created by Turing's biographer, Andrew Hodges: The Alan Turing Home Page.

From the Amazon review:

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
[Five Stars]
February 17, 2001

One of the most important books I've ever read. Without this book, the real Alan Turing might fade into obscurity or at least the easy caricature of an eccentric British mathematician. And to the relief of many, because Turing was a difficult person: an unapologetic homosexual in post-victorian england; ground-breaking mathematician; utterly indifferent to social conventions; arrogantly original (working from first principles, ignoring precedents); with no respect for professional boundaries (a 'pure' mathematician who taught himself engineering and electronics).

His best-known work is his 1936 'Computable Numbers' paper, defining a self-modifying, stored-program machine. He used these ideas to help build code-breaking methods and machinery at Bletchley Park, England's WWII electronic intelligence center. This work, much still classified today, led directly to the construction of the world's first stored-program, self-modifying computer, in 1948.

Computers were always symbol-manipulators, to Alan, not 'number crunchers', the predominant view even to von Neumann, and into the 60's and 70's. He designed many basic software concepts (interpreter, floating point), most of which were ignored (he wasn't exactly good at promoting his ideas). By 1948 Alan had moved on to studying human and machine intelligence, as a user of computers, again with his lack of social niceties and radical thinking, some of his ideas were baffling or embarrassing until 'rediscovered' decades later as brilliant insights into intelligence. His 'Turing test' of intelligence dates from this period, and is still widely misunderstood.

Poor Alan; his refusal to deceive himself or others and "go along" with the conventions of the time regarding sexuality caused him (and other homosexuals then) great problems; early Cold War England was not a good time to be gay, or a misfit, especially one with deep knowledge of war-time secrecy (he was technical crypto liason to the U.S., and one of the few with broad knowledge of operations at Bletchley, since he defined so much of it, in a time of extreme compartmentalization). His sexual escapades eventually got him in trouble, and his increasing isolation and the fact that he simply couldn't acknowledge some of his life's work due to secrecy, probably influenced his suicide at the age of 42.

I first discovered Turing-the-person in A HISTORY OF COMPUTING IN THE 20TH CENTURY (Metropolis, Howlett, Gian-Carlo Rota; Acedemic Press, 1980), where I.J. Good wrote, "we didn't know he was a homosexual until after the war... if the security people had found out [and removed him]... we might have lost the war". This led me to look for books on Turing, and then the Hodges book magically appeared on the shelf.

I am grateful that Hodges researched his life as well as his work, as far as the data allows. Knowing the whole is always important, but I think critical in Alan Turing's life. Clearly, I rate this one of the most important books I've ever read.

-Tom Jennings

Next month, we will explore the workings of a Turing Machine and follow Alan into the war effort. We will see how a single man's true genius can turn the tide of war, and we will shake our heads in disbelief at a hero's humiliation and eventual death. Stay tuned.

It's kind of sad that Slashdot linked to the first part of this series rather than waiting for it to finish. The true depth of Turing's story lies in what happened during the war. If you've never read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, now is an excellent time to start; Stephenson's fictional Turing is an excellent read.

Many who have studied Turing's life believe that this book by Hodges is the definitive work of a man who was arguably a casualty of his lifestyle. Turing's answers to the three Great Questions of Mathematics - Completeness - Is Mathematics complete? Could every question be proven or disproven? Consistency - Does Mathematics always give the same answer? - and Decidability - did a chain of logic exist to prove or disprove any assertion - well, all of these were overshadowed by the fact that as a homosexual he defied God's Will - but all in all his contributions to Mathematics are staggering.

The lasting pervasiveness of this man's work - (who doesn't know what a "Turing Test" is?) - is a living testament to his genius. It's funny that on the same day we discuss the Nobel Prize we discuss the man most obviously deprived of it.

... is here. I can't get to the site referenced in the article, so maybe they already mention it or link to it.

But in the usability sense explored by the Psychology of Programming field, there are important differences between programming languages, in terms of ease of use, learnability, maintainability, readability, syntactic surface area, cognitive load, etc.

The trivial fact that a language is Turing complete, does not mean that it's well designed or easy to use. It's not all just a function of the programmer's skill. Certainly there are objective qualitative differences between programming languages that make some substantially better than others.

-Don

hey retard turing would have loved a backdoor in it.

iirc turing was killed because he was a homosexual. he was arrested and had his security clearance revoked. then someone poisoned him with cyanide. its very sad.

anyway if you care check out the alan turing homepage

Turing's work saved countless thousands of lives, and was instrumental in developing the theories of modern mathematics and computer science.

But, that wasn't good enough for the British, who later killed him for being a homosexual..

Turing's work saved countless thousands of lives, and was instrumental in developing the theories of modern mathematics and computer science.

But, that wasn't good enough for the British, who later killed him for being a homosexual..