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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."
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
But of course the real point is: could you tell the difference?
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!
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"
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).
it seems like some countries *cough* *cough* go to war mostly for the economy
Name one war that was not fought for economic reasons. Even the so-called Crusades, nominally fought for religion, were an excuse to keep increasinly powerful nobility in check by making them incur such a large expense as trying to invade the middle east. Every war I can think of has economic motives despite frequent facades of other purposes. Not that there's anything wrong with that; large scale human social activity comes down to economics.
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.
But that was a long time ago, when that was the accepted practice. I'm not defending it, just explaining that's not how it is today. I think for most educated people nowadays, it doesn't matter what sexual orientation you are. You don't introduce yourself: "Hi, I'm Bob, and I'm straight"... You're just Bob, and that's who you are. "Stamping out anti-anything bias" is the wrong thing to do, just don't be biassed at all. People are people, and nothing more. I hate all the special priveleges special interest groups get nowadays. You have to hire X amount of black and/or gay and/or female people... Why can't I just hire whoever is most qualified for the job hmmm?
-Jesse, in a ranting mood.
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
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.
The idea of identifying gender, rather than human or not human, is actually much more subtle than might be at first realised. He of course meant this to be extended as we all nowadays quote the test, but the original idea is subtly elegant... He was tackling the problem from the other direction: forget a computer pretending to be "intelligent", but what do we mean by "thinking" - If a man can "pretend" to be a woman, as per his test, what does that prove? That he is a woman?! Of course not... Thus was does it mean to be a woman, etc etc - Turing was a genius with amazing insight and perception.
What a loss.
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.
Even if it was the above, it wouldn't be as ghastly a travesty as "A Beautiful Mind". A tale which Hollywood perverted in its anti-intellectualism to cure the complexes of the intellect-limited, so that the genius hero ends up telling the world that its not brains that matter but heart and love. The movie hero professed his love to his wife who had stood with him through madness. The real-life genius got dumped.
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...
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)'
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.
Now, come on. How does a computer scientist (for lack of a term broad enough to cover Turing) accidentally eat an apple laced with KCN? AFAIK cyanide isn't a common fixture of most computer/math research labs, and Turing as a (dabbling but competent) chemist would certainly have the common sense to not let a cyanide spill go uncleaned.
I mean, think about it. What would you do if your government arrested you and said, "Hey bub, you read too much porn and we think porn-reading is a mental illness, so we're putting you on estrogen to kill your sex drive. For life, probably, since nobody can really cure porn-reading. Oh, and you'll grow boobies. If you don't like it, you can take prison instead, where people will ass-rape you daily for being a porn-reading sicko. Have a nice day!"? (On the odd chance that you're a woman, instead imagine some mythical hormone that withers up your breasts, kills your libido, and turns you into a tomboy.) I'm not sure that I know any people, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, that wouldn't be demeaned and degraded by such a radical forced change to their identity.
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
He would have been delighted with a 1GHz / 1GB RAM machine and now it is just taken for granted.
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
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.