Looking At Turing

Jim Jones has written in with the first of a series that explores the history of Mr. Alan Turing, and his connection with digital computing.

Comments

Good History

[sleeperservice]

Nice article - and I'll look forward to the next installment.

Here's a question, though - Do we still live in an age where we can postulate these types of ideas and questions, or do we demand hard-core applications to come directly from speculative science?

I've wondered about that for a number of years now.

Re:Good History

[Strange_Attractor]

This sort of freewheeling speculation is still (and always will be) possible - at least to bright young people who can't be browbeated, bribed, or otherwise made to respect received wisdom that strikes them as wrong. A few current examples - Linux coders, Stephen Hawking, K. Eric Drexler. Entrenched, and "self-evidently true" beliefs insisted nothing concrete (or interesting or possible) would come of their work - which added to their inspiration.

Certainty that that era is over has probably a big part of the "give up" status-quo indoctrination (I do not mean to attack you, but I think it's food for thought).

Re:Good History

[Debillitatus]

Here's a question, though - Do we still live in an age where we can postulate these types of ideas and questions, or do we demand hard-core applications to come directly from speculative science?

Well, I guess for a good answer to that question, you need to know who the "we" are. I think that most people in the country as a whole are interested in science inasmuch as it can produce applications, and, in particular, applications which will affect their everyday life. For example, IMHO most people wouldn't consider what NASA does as "applied", since they don't see how they would benefit from it directly.

On the other hand, there is a large class of people who care about asking questions in a pure sense, and answering them without a lot of thought given to their applications. These people are the academics. For example, with few exceptions, academics fall into these this category. As a professor of (say) mathematics, one is rarely interested in commercial applications of the math one is doing, and depending on the field, not interested in whether the mathematics applies to anything at all. This is true of most academic fields. Historians ask those questions because they're the right questions to ask, not because it'll build a better motherboard.

Not very detailed

[gorilla]

It would be useful if they went into more details, eg what a turning machine is.

Alan Turing

[serpent0r]

I must say, Alan Turing is my favorite computer scientist, however I don't believe he get's the recommendation that he deserves. They just created a memorial for him, and the site states that they could not find funding from not even one major corporation. They had to rely on donations from the public. Here is the site. Alan Turing Memorial Site -Matt

Re:Alan Turing

[ChazeFroy]

I think just about every school with a Computer Science program has a machine named "turing". It's kind of like naming schools after famous people, but in a geeky way :-)

Re:Alan Turing

[ctid]

To anyone visiting Manchester in the North West of England, I'd recommend visiting the Turing Memorial. It's good to go in the evening, because in the dark the statue is very lifelike. I do an evening class in the building behind the statue (see photo) and even I jump sometimes when I cross the park on my way back, even though I've walked past the statue only two hours before!

Re:Alan Turing

[JordanH]

• I think just about every school with a Computer Science program has a machine named "turing". It's kind of like naming schools after famous people, but in a geeky way :-)
  

It could be they are naming it after the famous Computer Scientist, or it could be a joke on the Turing Machine. You know, like so they can say "and this, is the Turing Machine".

Kind of like how ILM used to have a computer named Dagobah.... "and this, is the Dagobah System".

Re:There's an out-of-print biography

[polymath69]

You don't mean this book, do you? It doesn't appear to be out of print...

In other news...

[itwerx]

...with the recent release of LOTR, Alan Turing has been found to be the originator of DNS and somewhat megalomaniac, as evidenced by this inscription:

One Rule Turing them all
One Find Turing them,
One Bring Turing them all
And in the darkness BIND them

(Who knew Tolkien was secretly dyslexic?)

Score=Funny - Right on!
Score=Offtopic - Oh yeah? Let's see you post something better! :)

Alan Turing home page

[devphil]

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

The classic five-star book on Turing

[SimHacker]

Alan Turing: The Enigma is the classic and most excellent biography of Alan Turing, that was recently re-issued.

Check out the great review on Amazon by Fidonet founder and homo-anarchist Tom Jennings!

-Don

Re:The classic five-star book on Turing

[SimHacker]

Here is the Amazon review by Tom Jennings of the classic book Alan Turing: The Enigma.

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

Re:The classic five-star book on Turing

[r]

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.

Re:What a teaser!

[sylvester]

> who doesn't know what a "Turing Test" is?

I'm sorry, I don't what you mean by "Turing Test". Perhaps we can talk about something else for a while.

:-)

Re:What a teaser!

[gordon_schumway]

Except most would decribe him as either a mathematician or computer scientist and the Nobel Prizes are awarded in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Economics, Literature and Peace.

Re:All Computers

[Merry_B.Buck]

Hardware is fine and dandy, but have you ever tried to find the right drivers for a Turing Machine? ArcServe and Veritas drivers only support a few hundred gigabytes of tape.

You'd think after 60 years someone could have at least invented a Turing Autoloader.

Re:Cryptonomicon.....

[4n0nym0u53 C0w4rd]

Although Turing was in Cryptonomicon, you have to remember that it is fiction. The fact is, it does take liberties with the truth in the name of dramatic license.

For a good biography of Turing, you should check out Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma. A bit of a dense read, but informative and comprehensive.

Mr. Alan Turing?????

[aquisgrana]

Surely Doctor Alan Turing.

He did his PhD at Princeton

hmm

[Docrates]

Warning: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (111) in /home/sites/site53/users/systool/stbwebsite/inc/da tabase.inc on line 17
Secret code error number 83: localhost, bfadmin.

Yes, that Turing sure was a complicated fellow...

Secret code

[Mr. Fred Smoothie]

Haha! I wasn't able to read the article, but due to their poor programming, I NOW KNOW THEIR SECRET CODE:

"error number 83: localhost, bfadmin"

If they did that

[epepke]

It's kind of sad that Slashdot linked to the first part of this series rather than waiting for it to finish.

If they did that, there would be bunches of messages chastizing the linker for linking to old news.

Many who have studied Turing's life believe that this book [turing.org.uk] by Hodges is the definitive work of a man who was arguably a casualty of his lifestyle.

I haven't seen any mention of the fact that there was a play based on this book. I know it ran in London because I saw it there. I think it also ran on Broadway.

Not the first, but in good company.

[SimHacker]

Plato and Leonardo da Vinci were gay scientists too, among many others. Turing certainly wasn't the first gay scientist, but he's in good company.

-Don

Re:can we please evolve

[The Ape With No Name]

If I remember correctly, in Leviticus, it also says that anyone who touches the skin of pig shall be cast out the village. I guess that means anyone who plays American Football is a filthy, remorseless heathen. At least, when the ball was made of pigskin...

King's College - Turing's College

[MikeCamel]

I went to King's College Cambridge, where Turing has the computer room named after him, and where, like one of the college's other famous sons, Rupert Brooke, he is certainly remembered, and respected. Cryptonomicon and Turing: The Enigma are both excellent reads, but we should remember the three places where his name really should live on: first, the Turing Test (for AI), second, in the Turing Machine, and third, in the the Church-Turing hypothesis.

Alan wasn't the first scientist to be gay - though he was one of the first high-profile scientists to die at least partly as the result of his sexuality. I'm not sure whether he would have made a good poster child (as our US cousins would put it), but he was a fascinating person, and a great one. He was certainly one of the founders of our community - I wonder how he would feel about it now?

turing memorial

[PlanetJIM]

I was wondering if anybody else here thought the statue at the Turing Memorial in Manchester is just a little bit morbid? Honestly, I was offended at first and the statue made me think more deeply about the many populations that owe Turing a debt of gratitude, but still... Maybe looking at the apple was just a little bit too much for me. Couldn't he have had a book TOO?

Turing Unfortunate End

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately Alan Turing suffered at the hands of the US government. His house was ransacked by a theif, he was also living with a man at the time. Police questioned Turing and Turing admitted to his homosexuality. At the time being a homosexual was illegal and Turing was forced into chemical treatments for his homosexuality (hormone treatment). After the humilation he recieved from the US government, whom he helped during WWII w/ his cipher "bombs" (mathematical devices that ticked) Alan Turing took his own life by eating a cynanide ladden apple.

Re:Turing Unfortunate End

[JimPooley]

How that got modded up as 'Informative' is beyond me. really it is, as it's wrong!

I think you'll find it was the UK government, and NOT the US government, who hounded Turing for his homosexuality.

Forthcoming Book: The Turing Test Source Book

[mindpixel]

I was recently asked to provide a chapter for this forthcoming book from Kluwer Academic Publishers in the Netherlands, edited by Robert Epstein and Grace Peters... Looking at the book proposal, I can see it's going to be THE Turing Test Source Book! It's subtitled: "Philospohical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer."

It will include contributions from Andrew Hodges, Jon Agar, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Dennett, Stevan Harnad, Kenneth Ford, Douglas Hofstader, John R. Lucas, Marvin Minsky, Roger Penrose, David Rumelhart, Selmer Bringsjord, Ned Block, David Chalmers, The Churchlands, Andy Clark, H. M. Collins, JAck Copeland, Hubert Dreyfus, Jerry Fodor, Robert M. French, Thomas Metzinger, Peter Millican, James Moor, Ariella V. Popple, Zenon Pylyshyn, John Searle, Hugh Loebner, Stuart Shieber, Richard Wallace, Joseph Weizenbaum, Rodney Brooks, Peter Dayan, Brue Edmonds, Anne Foerst, David Harel, Patrick J. Hayes, Mark Humphrys, Douglas Lenat, John McCarthy, Jon Oberlander, Ian Pratt, Willaim J. Rapaport, Murray Shanahan, Aron Sloman, Chris Thornton, Stuart Watt, Blay Whitby, Terry Winograd, Robbie Garner, Jason Hutchens,David Levy, Joseph Weintraub, Thomas Whalen, Veronique Bastin & Dennis Cordier, Kevin L. Copple, Bruce Cooper, Thad Crew, Richard Gibbons, Gerold Lee Gorman, David Hamill, Sandy Johnson & Chris Johnson, Chris S. Johnson, Laurence Matishak, Michael L. Maudin, Peter Neuendorffer, Michale Onofrio & Stephen Hildebran, Luke Pellen, Joseph Strout, Ed T. Toton III, Vladimir Veselov & Eugene Demchenko, George B. Dyson, Neil Gershenfeld, Michael Gross, Raymond Kurzweil, James Martin, Hans Moravec, Charles Platt and of course, myself.