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Alan Turing, the Inventor of Software
Roland Piquepaille writes "BusinessWeek celebrates its anniversary with a series of articles about the great thinkers and innovators from the past 75 years. The series stars with a profile of Alan Turing, "Thinking Up Computers." In case you forgot, Turing is the man who created the concept of a "universal machine" which would perform various and diverse actions when given various sets of instructions. In other words, he laid out in the 1920s the foundations of software. You'll find the introduction of Turing's profile, plus more details, photographs and references in this overview."
...or just a computer-generated one?
gay. This is a fact that much of the mainstream media glosses over in noting his accomplishments. (It is possible that there is an anti-gay bias in the history book authors' community... ;) )
:)
So, any time someone says gays are just a bunch of promiscuous, stupid sinners, ask them if they've ever heard of Alan Turing...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
So now we know who to blame for the whole mess!
Free Firefox news reader.
he died suddenly, almost certainly by suicide from eating a cyanide-laced apple.
Has anyone else heard the rumur that apple computers logo is a tribute to Turing? Rainbow colored apple with a bite taken out of it and all? I wish I could remember where I heard that.
Ansi's and stupid tricks!
"Turing is the man who created the concept of an "universal machine" which would perform various and diverse actions when given various sets of instructions. In other words, he laid out in the 1920s the foundations of software."
Actually the turing machine served as the basis of the first hardware, not software. Its really the theoretical basis for the entire computing model.
I don't mean to be picky, but I have my Automata Theory final in 5 hours and I just spent all night studying for it..
-ashot
I think Lawrence Waterhouse and Rudy von Hacklheber deserve some credit, too.
Equivalence to a turing machine is used in lots of CS proofs even today.
The turing test is also still considered one of the fundamental challenges of 'weak' Artificial Intelligence.
Well... Turing whas the inventor of turing machines. But Aristoteles provide the logic. So maybe a more accurate title can be "Alan Turing, the Inventor of Turing machine" or maybe "Alan Turing, the ''Inventor'' of Computers". Not true, but better title.
-Woof woof woof!
A hollow voice says, "Jacquard", whose NC looms were old long before Turing came along. Turing put a firm theoretical foundation under what others had been doing for some time.
Alan invented Enigma, a machine to decode encrypted messages from the Germans. With all the inventions that come out of war it seems like some countries *cough* *cough* go to war mostly for the economy and the technological advancements spawned from it.
In today's more diverse world and more global economy, it seems like ware is less and less good vs evil and more a difference of opinion. One has to wonder if global peace would hinder technological progress.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I'd say his concepts defined the requirements or foundations of how the hardware would operate. Maybe I'm being pedantic as form follows function; software is dictated to a large degree by the base hardware.
I just finished Discrete Structures II. In this class we were to idealize a Turing machine, as a C program. We also went over Alan Turing's paper (the one linked in the article). My professor, who has been involved in cryptographic research for over 20 years, even he went so far as to say that Turing could be labeled a genius. Call me a dork, but I found the automatas to be one of the funnest parts of my CS education.
Didn't I read somewhere that someone had a conversation with Al Gore and it turned out that Gore failed the Turing test?
In case you forgot, Turing is the man who created the concept of an "universal machine" which would perform various and diverse actions when given various sets of instructions.
What, your history books don't go past the 1900's?
I always though Ada Lovelace was considered to be the first "programmer"
Not only was Turing gay, but his society "rewarded" him for his contributions by arresting and convicting him for a homosexual encounter. He was an honest man, and talked about it in court. And so then, the British government subjected him to chemical castration. His suicide followed that conviction. Please do your bit to stamp out anti-gay bias in your workplace and society. There are a lot of contributing, good people in computer science, and every other field. It's really a shame how most of the world mistreats them.
Turing is one of the reasons that I'm heading to King's College to take my PhD (although the Turing room there is hardly a suitable tribute to his memory).
The end to his story is extremely tragic (although this must all be taken with a pinch of salt) - apparently, had Turing's involvement in the war effor been known, he would have been saved the indignity of the trials and medical procedures that were foisted upon him. Given that he arguably won the war for us, that doesn't seem unreasonable. Unfortunately the paranoia surrounding the country after the war meant that Turing's involvement had to remain a secret until the 1970s which was clearly far too late. As a result, the intolerance of the time lost us the service of one of the finest minds and most decent men we've seen.
henry
i don't do sigs. oops.
I see that someone else already mentioned Charles Babbage, who designed a mechanical proccessing engine, in addition to mechanical calculating engines. But Lady Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, wrote the first computer program for Babbage's Analytical Engine... (and you folks may recall that there is today a programming language named in her honor).
The Abacus is the first real computer!!
Nice try, but Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage are recognised as the inventors of modern computing and programming. I suggest reading a bit about the architecture of the analytical, difference and related "engines" that he designed: they should remarkable similarity to a von neumann / harvard architecture (i.e. central processing units, memory banks, ALUs, etc).
Not to undervalue Alan Turing's contribution though, but he was really breaking more substantial ground in the theory of computability; which really transcends software, hardware, and the trivial implementation details.
Alan Turing actually fits alongside Newton and Eistein and those others who developed great universal insights.
It's a bit sickening that already posts on this thread are making gay-bashing remarks about him. The history of how he was discarded by the British Government, believed to be partly at the instigation of the US government, is a sad story of how intolerance helped the British lose their early lead in computing. If he had been born forty years later, he'd probably be running an equivalent of Apple,Oracle, Sun or Microsoft, and no-one would care about what he did in his spare time.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
IIRC, Turning used a bunch of wheels w/ gears to simulate the Enigma machine and break the code. Not entirely sure what he did after the war. Sounds like hardware to me. He also laid down the rules for the Turing test whereby we would be able to test an AI.
I thought Babbage and Lady Ada Lovelace were the first software inventors. Or was that programmers?
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
Here is a nice clickable overview:
History of computers
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
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
"... he laid out in the 1920s the foundations of software"
Actually it was the 30's (especially given that he was born in 1913, so even at the end of the 20's he was still a teenager).
But at that same time in the thirties, the German Conrad Zuse wasn't just 'thinking it up' but doing it. Unfortunately, by being in the wrong country at the wrong time, he still is rarely credited.
I've been thinking about the Turing test lately and I wonder if it's not inherently flawed. It requires human perception, which is fallible and inconsistent, to validate the quality of AI. I certainly think it's an important component - that is, drawing from human ability to recognize animated life - but being able to fool a human being isn't the same as artificially intelligent.
If you add in self-preservation as a requirement (Asimov) perhaps it would be a better test.
Turing was an amateur chemist in addition to being a world-class mathematician. His choice of suicide method was intended to lessen the impact it would have on other members of his family, in particular his mother. By eating a cyanide laced apple, it has been speculated that he wanted to make his death look like an accident. His mother would think that he had been performing some chemistry experiment, and then forgot to thoroughly wash his hands before eating the apple. Having one's son die is bad enough, but for it to be a suicide is doubly worse.
On the more dramatic side, if one were so inclined, it could be said that his method of suicide was rather symbolic. Turing had partook in what was in his day forbidden. For this, he had been "cast out" of his chosen profession and what he loved to do -- in some sense, his Eden. As a final gesture before leaving this world, he ate a piece of forbidden fruit that was symbolic of this fact.
It's a tragedy that the ignorance and intolerance of first half of the 20th century could have driven such a brilliant man to suicide. If it weren't for Turing, much of what we take for granted today may be a lot different or may not even exist at all. Hopefully the world has wisened over the last 50 years.
So he's the bastard that is responsible for all that spyware I'm consiantly cleaning off of computers.
Thanks alot buddy!
In case anyone is interested, check out the book "The Turing Option" which is based loosely on Alan Turing's concepts/etc:
4 46 364967/002-6669792-7192001?v=glance
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
-Mike
Ada is credited with being the first programmer
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
Actually, according to what he wrote in his letters and the memories of his friends, it was not so much the surveillance per se, as the overall inability to get work done or have a satisfying life that left him feeling so hopeless. The hormones did awful things to his body, from reduction in sex drive to growing breasts, the police bullied a street kid into faking the confession that led to Turing's conviction, the funding in England was getting routed around him and his travel was impaired by government restrictions. (This, keep in mind, while the Americans were surging ahead in computer design and would have been delighted to have Turing join them.)
Oh, it was death by a thousand cuts while the nation that owed so much to him mostly looked on and let him be humiliated and kept from his work.
Also keep in mind folks, that Turing, while thought of a theoretician, was arguably even more important as an operations guy. He led the effort to confront Churchill with the initial absurdly low levels of funding at Bletchley Park (the British code-breaking center), he played a key role in getting the staffing figured out and codes to the right places, and so on. IIRC, he was not averse to picking up a soldering iron and stepping into the physical work of *building* the computers.
Of course, this isn't even getting into his late in life interest in things like how to use a computer to replicate patterns in nature like the spots on the side of a cow. Work that was leading him decades ahead of anybody else to the concepts we now know as fractals and chaotic phenomena.
We'll never know what we've lost, but at least we're getting better at admitting who people like him were.
But then, when we've still got stuff like A Beautiful Mind not even mentioning that Nash was mostly gay (the real reason he lost his clearance was not for mental illness but because he was found in bed with a young man) we've clearly got a long way to go.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Enigma was the cipher (and machines) the Germans were using.
The machines Turing designed to crack the Enigma cipher were called Bombes.
Babbage did the real work.
Don't forget the poet Ada, who was set to be a programmer long before Turing (yes, for Babbage)
Unquestionably he'd use Gentoo.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Ahh, yes, I was wondering who this Turing fellow was, but couldn't for the life of me remember. Now that we've cleared that up, can you remind me about this Linus Torvalds guy? And who the hell are Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson?
/. readers will have "forgotten" who Alan Turing is... Perhaps a simple link for the n00bs would've been more appropriate.
Really, I don't think too many self respecting
ehintz
An excellent biography is "Alan Turing, the Enigma" by Andrew Hodges, 1983, updated American edition 2000: http://www.turing.org.uk/book/
Derek Jacobi starred in a 1986 play about Alan Turing and also the excellent 1996 television adaptation. Videos can be purchased.
The site linked by the slashdot article incorrectly identifies a photograph of an Enigma machine. It shows the cryptographic device manufactured by the Germans to encode and decode messages. This is not a device invented by Turing. He had a key role in the development of the programmable computing systems used by the British to crack intercepted German messages.
The game of Go (Igo, Weiqi, Baduk) has the simplest concept and the deepest play.
Definitely one of the handful of brightest minds of the 20th Century and one of the people most individually responsible for the victory of the Allies after WWII. His subsequent treatment was vile and deplorable, but hey, how is that new in the military? Check out those prisoners... mmm, mmm, mmm... that's some good stuff. Considering the hypocrisy involved in the British Military going after a homosexual for being a security risk, well, I'll just leave off here.
Turing's work on AI was so revolutionary that the entire field pretty much languished for a couple decades after his death until people finally started to pick up where he left off.
Turing's contributions were obviously profound but Lisp fans demand that Alonzo Church's contributions be given similar recognition.
an ill wind that blows no good
More than a practical test, it continues to illustrate the inherent limits on such tests and concepts.
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
The Alan Turing Story, starring Will Smith as Turing, showing how this plucky young American invented computers and saved the girl!
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
Alan invented Enigma, a machine to decode encrypted messages from the Germans. Uh, No. Turing invented the Bombe, which was used to decode the Enigma transmissions made by the germans. It was the germans who invented the Enigma machine. Given that the Enigma machine when properly setup could encode over 15 million million million combinations, cracking it was no mean feat. If you're in the UK I can recommend a visit to Bletchley Park which these days is a fascinating museum. And if you're knowledge of Enigma is based on Hollywood schlock like U-571 i'd suggest you read up on the truth! Also, kind of fittingly a park in Manchester is dedicated to Alan Turing with a statue of him. It sits between the UMIST institute of science and technology and the gay village.
If you're interested in Turing, you might like the Turing Archive. This site has scans of a lot of his personal papers and research notes. You can read all his unpublished stuff too :)
Starring Halle Barry as his love interest, Lady Ada Lovelace. Famous for its one-liners used during gun battles with Enigma Nazis: "Code This!" and *BLAM!* BLAM!* "You failed the Turing Test.". Directed by Jerry Bruckheimer, it features Enigma machines that blow up like the Hindenburg whenever the wrong code is entered.
Negotiations are underway with Barry Sonnenfeld's production company to bring back the giant robot spider from "Wild Wild West" to make an appearance as the very first computer bug.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I thought it was "Whoa to hice".
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
Jacquard developed looms that could be controlled by using punched cards, but this wasn't really
"programming" as such. What Turing created was the concept of algorithm execution, which until then nobody had come up with.
Algorithm execution is where the data and the sequence of instructions for manipulating that data are all part of your input. Jacquard's loom was more along the lines of just the data being in his punched cards, while the sequence of events that occurred was built into the loom, and only dependant upon the punched cards for specific info about position and such.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Not to take anything from Turing but wasn't she recognized as the first programmer by coding a virtual program for a virtual (now working) computer conceived by Charles Babbage in 1843?
m
http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/love.ht
"When inspired Ada could be very focused and a mathematical taskmaster. Ada suggested to Babbage writing a plan for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. This plan, is now regarded as the first "computer program.""
I hope you're aware that I was joking...
What you have understand is that Turing didn't know about push down automata (PDA) when he developed the Turing machine (TM). Turing formulated the TM as a way to show that our formal axiomatic system for mathematics was undecidable (that is, there are statements whose truth values cannot be determined algorithmically). When he designed it, the states of the machine were compared to human states of mind. Finite automata (FA) and PDAs are things that logicians and theoretical computer scientists have developed over the years as simpler models of computation. By teaching about them in an automata theory class, students are more prepared for the concepts of the TM. If I just plopped the general definition of a TM down in front of a person, they'd probably run screaming from the room or at least be horribly confused until examples of simpler devices were presented. (Also, FAs and PDAs have the nice property of recognizing regular and context-free languages, respectively, which allows a discussion of formal languages and their recognition to progress in a natural manner.)
I guess that my point is that the way we are taught mathematics (and that's what the theory of computation is) does not always coincide with the order in which the ideas were developed, no matter how natural the order they are taught in might seem. (For another example, consider that most calculus texts develop differentiation before integration, which is historically backward. The only text that I know of that presents calculus in the historically-correct order is Tom M. Apostol's Calculus. However, in his Mathematical Analysis, he follows the traditional order of differentiation first.)
"You will only be remembered for two things: the problems you solve or the ones you create." Mike Murdock
Turing left a bunch of still new ideas unexplored. Just look at his 48's paper Intelligent Machinery> .
Recurrent connectionism was the starting point, and P machines have not even been explored.
What's in a sig?
What's in a sig?
It's arguable that Turing won the war by decoding the enigma. If it wasn't for him, the Nazis would've probably won - and you'd presumably feel right at home. Twat.
He also foresaw a day when computer porn would no longer just be on punchcards...
I saw it. I stepped on it. My bad, but other life forms are likely to visit our planet at some point.
Punchcard computer porn? This explains that early XXX effort, "The Adventures of Dangling Chad".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
IMHO, he invented the first programming language.
Details here
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
I think you are referring to the "Young Turing" movie "biography" starring Yahoo Serious. This details Turing's life growing up in Australia where he rassles crocodiles and invents shoelaces and joins a rock and roll band. Later, when he grows up, he invents computing when he figures out how to crack RIAA encryption in order to download the latest "Wyld Stallyns" tunes.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Actually the turing machine served as the basis of the first hardware, not software.
:) The important thing is to acknowledge which contributions they each made and try to do it correctly without letting the labels get in the way. And for that, I turn you to the expert:
:)
It's usually John von Neumann who is given credit for inventing the modern concept of the "stored program" in the mid 40's. So if I had to pick a single person to label the inventor of software, I think I would probably choose him. Turing could perhaps be labelled a father of computing.
But then again, those are all just subjective labels.
Alan Turing
John von Neumann
I don't mean to be picky, but I have my Automata Theory final in 5 hours
Good luck.
A good faggot is a dead faggot. Good riddance
Look, if you're going to make ignorant, bigoted insults, at least put in the time and effort to make them properly constructed ignorant, bigoted insults. I mean, it's bad enough being a jackass--why make yourself a dork, too? See, you switched up "good" and "dead". What you said doesn't even make sense.
If he had been black/female/whatever, and accomplished what he did, and in the end was imprisoned and eventually driven to suicide as a direct result of his ethnicity, he would be constantly brought up as a grim example of racism.
Children in school would learn about how the man who cracked Enigma and might have literally saved WW2 was eventually driven to commit suicide....
While no gay person I know has even heard of Turing. I never heard about him until college.
I think its another case of people not giving a damn about geeks...
It's not an absolutely accepted fact that Alan Turing did in fact commit suicide - his mother always denied that he would have done it, suggesting that it was his terribly careless nature which caused him to accidentally eat an apple which had come into contact with potassium cyanide.
Andrew Hodges, whose biography of Turing is the most well read, is a fairly active gay-rights campaigner (more power to him), and it benefits his agenda to accept the death as suicide without writing perhaps slightly more about the circumstances surrounding Turing's death.
He is also commemorated by a small stretch of the Ring Road aroung Manchester. We know how to hype our National Heros.
My point here is that simply in and of itself anyones sexuality is pretty irrelivant, but the prejudice surrounding homosexuality directly impacted Turing's life. Because fo that failing to mention that he was gay would be similar to failing to mention that Beethoven was deaf. You'll notice that you don't often see articles about Motzart talking about how he was able to hear either. These facts were important to their lives, in a way that, say, Albert Einstein's hetrosexuality wasn't. Streightness is not mentioned much because it is assumed that a person is streight unless its otherwise specified, and due to its wide acceptance hetrosexuality simply doesn't affect a person much. However other sexual specifics are mentioned when its important (JFK's affairs, St. Francis' chastity, etc).
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
I thought George Boole, could be more accurately called 'The Inventor of Software'. Doesn't boolean algebra lay the foundation for which programming is based upon.
Who cares? Aside from the fact that Turing's sexuality is not ignored, it would be a good thing if it was. Let me guess: if it was something that the mainstream media obsessed about, you'd post comments about how homophobia in mainstream media glosses over Turing's accomplishments in favor of irrelevant discussion of his sexual preferences.
Go read Cryptonomicon if you need to obsess about what everybody's sexuality is.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
I think you'll find that Lawrence Waterhouse was really the father of modern computing. I'm surprised his grandson Randy hasn't popped up here to set you guys straight.
A Secret Admirer
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
Ugh! I would have preferred NOT knowing that he was black. It's like finding out that Albert Einsteim liked to eat his own boogers.
Almost certainly comes from their love for the Beatles
Hell of a way to treat a man who saved hundreds, maybe thousands of lives by breaking the Enigma cypher.
The Enigma had more combinations than there are molecules in the visible universe...if the History Channel told me right. More than "4*10^26" if "Enigma+combinations" is Googled.
No small feat.
Timely information during war is priceless. The Allied effort in Africa during WWII was aided considerably with the code-cracking.
True, the English didn't want to expose that they were listening to EVERY conversation - but to not use the info would be foolish.
AFAIK, to hide the fact that they knew everything that was being encrypted, they would establish alibis. Something like sending a surveilance plane during the day to fly near areas where military presence/movement was greatly increasing (just make sure that plane gets NOTICED). That way, the Germans would assume that the English found out because of that damn plane instead of the detailed reports being sent through their cracked channel (which enjoyed continued use).
The German navy was better at security, but it was still based on a mostly broken system. They could have at least randomized the sequence of characters used on the wheels.
This is not my sig.
I like how the poster complains that it wasn't explicitly made clear he was gay - as if that was relevant at all. This reminds me of an Onion spoof :
Alan Mathison Turing was one of the great, gay pioneers of the computer field.
He inspired the now common terms of "The Turing Machine" and "Turing's Test.", and preferred the company of men to women. As a mathematician he applied the concept of the algorithm to digital computers, and liked to kiss and hold other men.
The homosexual's research into the relationships between machines and nature created the field of artificial intelligence. His intelligence and foresight made him one of the first to step into the information age. His sexual preference was for men.
Turing developed a model for computers (the Turing machine). He developed the proof of the Halting problem. That is, given a program and a input to that program, you cannot generally determine if the program will terminate execution.
As you're probably already aware, Turing was arrested and imprisoned for homosexuality. After he was released, he undertook a multi-month project to extract cyanide from the pits of apples. After he had sufficient quantities, he drank it and died (aged early 40s).
Kurt Godel was responsible for developing the mathematical proof of undecidability. Given a system with the capabilities of "simple" arithmetic, he showed that there are propositions (i.e. statements) you can make within the system which can be neither proven nor disproven. This is equivalent to Turing's "halting problem".
Godel was paranoid, and believed that people were trying to poison him. He only ate what his wife cooked. When she died, he stopped eating and starved himself to death.
Emil Post was an American mathematician (Columbia Ph.D., i think) who developed a proof of undecidability many years before Godel. In addition, he developed a model for computation which is similar to Turing's machine (it uses a pre-loaded queue to both hold the input string, and to hold the results of intermediate computations). He developed a proof of undeciability based upon his machine model (the "Post Correspondence Problem").
Post was a manic-depressive for most of his life. He lost an arm in an accident as a child. He had a hard time holding jobs after receiving his Ph.D. due to his depression. In the 50's he was treated for depression using Electro-Shock therapy (for interested readers... for a real shock go look up the 1948 or 1949 Nobel prize for Medicine :-). After one of his "treatments", he suffered a heart attack and died.
So, in conclusion, it's rather interesting to reflect upon the fact that the foundations of computer science comes from three individuals who suffered clear psychological problems. (And they wonder why nerds work in the dark :-)
with the diference engine.
Sorry.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Yes, I see where you're going, but you're wrong. There is a difference between appearance (black) and behavior (gay). It is wrong to persecute someone on appearance. To discriminate based on behavior is not only correct, it is sometimes necessary.
Proverbs 21:19
Did Turing's affectional orientation effect his contribution to computer science? Certainly, even if only because his life was cut short by cruelty. But there are more important lessons to be learned as well. The permanent state of exception (extra-legal state of emergency, think Patriot Act) and the selection of a single group for sacrifice to the "good" of all (think not of gay marriage but of the response, several states have stripped LGBT individuals of even basic protection under civil law) exactly mirror the conditions of the democratically elected government of 1930's Germany. Several theoriticians like Giorgio Agamben have studing the juridical conditions that brought about the Nazi's Reich. Technology may be exactly the tool that prevents these things from ever happening again.
It's this mentality that leads to patents. Someone else would have discovered these ideas if this nice man hadn't.
-I am an elective eunuch.
Are there a lot of overzealous gay rights activist moderators today?
"Homophobia is bad!"
Well, durr...
While Jacqard certainly has a major place in the history of computers, his looms can not be said to been computers in the sence we use today as they could "solve" only one problem - how to make fabrik.
No, the true inventor, if such a word can be used, of the true programable, mulitpurpose computer is one of Great Britans great geniuses from the early 1800s - Charles Babbage. In 1835 he presented a design for a programable, mechanical computer - the Analytical engine. It was to be powered by steam, and would been 30 meters long (roughtly 100') and 10 meters wide (roughtly 30'). It would use cards simular to those invented by Jacqard for input, while output was via a mecanical printer (rather simular to the printingpresses employed by newspapers), a curveplotter and a bell. Unlike modern, binary machines it would use base 10 in it's calculations.
Ada Lovelace, as someone else pointed out, was the first programmer for the analytical engine. It would have employed a launguage very simular in most respects to modern assembler, including the possibility to branch and loop.
More on his analytcal engine can be found here.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Play with that a while, and you'll see why that was such a bitch to crack.
".....we need in order to calculate the theoretical number of possible Enigma configurations. It is simply the product of all five values calculated above. That astounding number is 3,283,883,513,796,974,198,700,882,069,882,752,878, 379,
955,261,095,623,685,444,055,315,226,006,433,615,62 7,409,
666,933,182,371,154,802,769,920,000,000,000
which is approximately 3 × 10^114. To see just how large that number is, consider that it is estimated that there are only about 10^80 atoms in the entire observable universe. No wonder the German cryptographers had confidence in their machine!"
from: http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00004.cfm
This is such a weak arguement, I am shocked seemingly intelligent people use it. The reason not to mention that some one is straight, hetero, a breeder, etc, is that people are not beat to death for being straight. There are not counties voting to ban and arrest straight people(Tennessee anyone?). There are not governments that arrest and execute straight people(most of the African continent and Caribean). I can pass as a straight man, and have never been mistreated for it. But I have been surrounded by five men and beat to the ground because I'm gay. If you support open-source and the progressive era of invention and discovery, how can you not see that the world does not judge men like Turing by their talent, only by the labels that are put on them?
[From Babbage link] A variety of Action Cards perform non-arithmetic operations related to the calculation. The Action Cards are: B - Ring a bell to attract the attention of the attendant.
:-)
Mr. Babbage invented chr(7) back then. Now THAT is impressive
Table-ized A.I.
I can't wait for the Alexander the Great biopic from Hollywood where he will be a straight blond American.
Wouldn't Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace be the first developers of software? I know both of them had several programs ready to go once Babbage had his computer completed in the 1800's. Unfortunately funding stopped. However, this is better than Turing ever did, because his Infinite machine was even more theoretical than Babbages.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
My nickname is chosen after the fact that I am gay and I admire Alan Turing.
There is a blog, Gaygeeks, in which Turing is a well-known hero.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
He would have been delighted with a 1GHz / 1GB RAM machine and now it is just taken for granted.
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Ha?
Boolean logic has a lot more to do with machine computation.
--- Just say no to negativity.
Just to clarify, the Halting Problem is undecidable, not impossible.
i.e. There are many cases wherein one machine can compute whether another machine will halt.
Isn't Avogadro's number 6 x 10E23? That's the number of atoms in one mole of a substance, i.e. 12 grammes of Carbon 12. Therefore 12 Kilogrammes has 6E26 atoms. Therefore there are a few more than 4E26 molecules in the visible universe, I suspect.
***You learn something Every day. And then you die.***
I just want to clarify that I didn't mean to imply that Babbage didn't know about punch cards - he did, to a very great extent.
I reccommend that if you want to find out more about Charles Babbage and his contributions to computing, you should read "The Difference Engine" by Doron Swade (ISBN 0-670-91020-1) - I think /. has had a review on it in the past, as well - it is an excellent book which clears up a lot of confusion about Babbage, Ada, and a whole host of other characters (steampunk as reality?)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Babbage employed a series of very skilled draftsmen/engineers of his time (in some ways, they were the best in their fields).
I would say most of the problems with the Analytical Engine not being built had to do with Babbage's constant redesign of it, along with not being able to secure the funds to build it - coupled with other reasons.
As for the Difference Engine - it is interesting to note that Babbage had a falling out with his main engineer/draftsman - over payment or somesuch for work. This individual (Clement), through a series of disputes, eventually killed the relationship and contract with Babbage (and the Treasury, which provided the finance). Most of the parts that were built ended up being melted down as "scrap", others were used for test models. The other drawings and models, etc were eventually returned to Babbage, but only after some very drawn out legal ordeals. I liken a lot of this similar to today's patent disputes and/or copyright disputes.
Finally, in a way, a form of "DRM" also helped put nails in the coffin of the Difference Engine - in that Clement, when he left, took all of the tools and jigs needed to build the parts with him when the contract ended (actually, IIRC, it was part of the contract he signed with Babbage, that any tools or jigs he constructed, along with all rights, would remain with him at the end of the contract). In a way, it would be like having the code for a project, but your programmer leaves with the one copy of the compiler, which he wrote...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I think his point was more along the lines of "I didn't know that, and really didn't care to know." It's like seeing pictures of Cindy Crawford taking a dump. Yeah, you know she does but... you'd rather not know about it.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
There are quite a few benefits that are gained from marriage.
The right to visit your spouse in the hospital. "Family only"
The right to 'pull the plug' on your spouse.
The right to inherit property from your spouse.
The ability to be covered under your spouse's insurance.
I am gonna disagree with your presentation of historical fact also.
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
Darl McBride, on the other hand...
That which does not kill her only prolongs my agony.
Tommy Flowers in my verdict was more important to the development of the first electronic computer than Turin. Tommy built Colossus under Turin's direction during the Second World War and is often overlooked as he turned Turin's ideas into a reality.
Tommy died quite recently in comparative obscurity. After the war he tried to encourage the Post Office (whom he worked for) to develop a digitally controlled automatic telephone exchange. The Post Office (now BT) didn't understand what he was suggesting, so digital telephone exchanges were not developed until the late 1970's, some 30 years later.
It takes a genius to come up with an idea, but it takes another genius from an engineering background to turn them into something that will work.
Um, no. The idea of an algorithm was invented by an Arab (al-Khowarizmi, or something like that) centuries before Turing *or* Jacquard. We also get the word "algebra" from the title of one of his writings.
Hmmm, what you seem to be describing is the idea of representing programs and data in the same store, which IIRC is due to von Neumann.
As to whether or not something is "programming" seems to be subjective. The loom has hardware to arrange the threads this way or that; the computer has hardware to add or shift. Either way there are some data which the machine would interpret as "do this, then do that." One is a data-driven device which operates on thread; the other a data-driven device which operates on data.
Also, it was kind of stupid to begin with - giving him estrogens to try and stop his sex drive. There have been androgen blockers out there on the market almost as long as estrogens. Heck, even licorice and cannabis are androgen blockers to some degree. Estrogens are only partially effective at blocking androgens on their own - ask any male to female transsexual. :)
"She was out of her depth in a shallow pool." -- Peggy Noonan on Sarah Palin
Ah, terminology.
"universal machine" here is a rather specialized term. A Turing machine is able to evaluate some set of computable functions; a universal Turing machine is able to simulate any possible Turing machine and so can evaluate any computable function. Whether or not Babbage's Analytical Engine is equivalent to a UTM is a question I'm not skilled to answer, but I'll bet he had no idea how to think about it in those terms. What Turing gave us was worked-out theory on what is and is not computable, and some ideas about classes of computable functions and what it takes to evaluate them.
Did the Countess of Lovelace ever actually write code for the AE? It was never built and could not be built until quite recently due to the manufacturing tolerances required. A few years back someone built a portion of the "mill", but a complete AE as Babbage envisioned it has never existed.
My original point was about calling Turing the "inventor of software". Depending on your definition of software, it goes way, way back. That has very little to do with a "programmable, multipurpose computer" which, while a really valuable object, isn't what the article discusses.
Al Gore invented software!
-J
Not quite. Kurt Godel demonstrated that mathematics (or any sufficiently powerful "formal system") was either complete (all valid statements are decidable) or inconsistent.
Turing demonstrated that -- assuming you want your system to be consistent -- there is no finite, deterministic method for determining whether a given statement in that system is decidable or not.
I.e., not only is mathematics "sullied" by these undecidable statements, but there is no way to neatly characterize them.
This was the last nail in the coffin of the Hilbert Program. (David Hilbert was a leading German mathematician of the early 20th century). Hilbert asserted that mathematics can be characterized as "an inventory of provable formulas", without possibility of inconsistency (i.e., it was not possible for 'A' and 'Not A' to be true at the same time). Godel proved that not all formulas are proveable. Turing destroyed any remaining hope by proving that there was no way cordone off the unprovable formulas.
Odly enought the first programmer is often said to be Ada Lovelace in the 1830's. It was all theory and paper based but the basic idea of a program was there.
Alan Turing was not the inventor of Software. That distinction belongs to the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, Augusta Ada Byron (1815-1852) who worked with Babbage on the Analytical Engine.
Turing is instead considered the founder of computing science. See http://www.turing.org.uk/ for more information.
Please try to get your facts straight. These editors really should lift their game.
I thought it was Randall L. Waterhouse
As others have said, surely the best sign of a healthy and bias-free society wouldn't be that they felt able to mention his sexuality, but that they did't see the point of mentioning it?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
A culture could share some infrastructural characteristics with 1930s Germany indefinitely, and still never spawn anything even remotely as horrible as the Third Reich. The creation and suspension of laws do not a tyrrany make.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Turing invented the calculating "engine".
It was Ada Lovelace (in whose honour the programming language was named) who invented software and instructions.
The perfect pair to be misunderstood and marginalised - a gay bloke and a technically-savvy woman.
It's been said that, if British Intelligence had been as squeamish about homosexuality during wartime as it was during peacetime, Turing would have been arrested sooner, and Germany would have won the war.
(Paraphrasing Simon Singh in "The Code Book.")
Is a Honda Goldwing!
There is no infinite tape with simple instructions in my version.
Although I see no problem paying respect to an underappreciated mathematician, I'm always a little weary of how we seem to forget the contributions of others. For instance, Martin Davis in his book "Computability and Unsolvability" refers to Turing machines as a Turing-Post machine (perhaps a nod to his former undergraduate advisor). Also, Kleene invented the notion of a "primitive recursive functions". This was shown by Alonzo Church to be equally as powerful as Turing's Universal Computer. In other words, there were alot of guys involved in developing the foundations of computer science. How often do you hear of Emil Post, Stephen Kleene, and Alonzo Church? Heck, it was quite 'en vogue' to create fundemental models of computation|mathematics. I've seen models bearing the names of Markov, Godel, etc. "Computability: An Introduction to Recursive Function Theory" by Nigel Cutland has a chapter devoted to the subject.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
Isn't that special treatment?
But seriously, george bush is president,
gay marriage is still illegal in most of the us,
and PEOPLE and GOVERMENTS are still PANICKY PREJUDICIAL OPRESSIVE SOBs, welcome to Earth, enjoy your stay
I mean just look at his picture, who'd have ever thunk it
_ 19 /art04_19/0419_24innova.jpg
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04
I would of thought the founder of Lisp would be gay...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The 1949 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine was awarded to ANTONIO CAETANO DE ABREU FREIRE EGAS MONIZ for his work showning that pre-frontal lobotomies were effective in controlling behavior for certain psychoses.
Um, no. The idea of an algorithm was invented by an Arab (al-Khowarizmi, or something like that) centuries before Turing *or* Jacquard. We also get the word "algebra" from the title of one of his writings.
:)
Hmmm, what you seem to be describing is the idea of representing programs and data in the same store, which IIRC is due to von Neumann.
What I'm describing is not an "algorithim". I'm trying to explain the concept of "algorithim execution" and I'm obviously not having a lot of success... So go Google for it or something.
As to whether or not something is "programming" seems to be subjective. The loom has hardware to arrange the threads this way or that; the computer has hardware to add or shift. Either way there are some data which the machine would interpret as "do this, then do that." One is a data-driven device which operates on thread; the other a data-driven device which operates on data.
I agree, but I think the difference is in the more general purpose nature of the computer processor than the loom. I highly doubt the loom's instruction set is Turing-complete.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.