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Alan Turing, the Inventor of Software

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-broke-my-turing-machine dept.

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."

14 of 371 comments (clear)

  1. Turing was also... by JessLeah · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Turing was also... by Enigma_Man · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why is that important? Do you list whether or not a person is heterosexual in an article or biography about someone? What about the color of their skin or hair.

      I can just imagine all the articles. Joe Schmoe, a straight white man with brown hair, accomplished much in his life blah blah.

      Oh noooo, it's a conspiracy against the gay! Let's all point the prejudice finger.

      -Jesse

      --
      Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
    2. Re:Turing was also... by JohnGrahamCumming · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The article clearly points this fact out, as does every other frikkin' article on Alan Turing, to which the answer should probably be: WHO GIVES A CRAP?

      Why waste ink on this almost useless fact (other than it perhaps leading to the circumstances of his death) when there's a lot more worth saying about the guy.

      I just hope that if I ever doing something amazing that after my death we don't get to read:

      "John Graham-Cumming invented the Banana Wumpus Driver. At age 13 he realized that he was attracted to women and spent his entire life in pursuit of sexual encounters with various women until he finally married..."

      John.

    3. Re:Turing was also... by Aardpig · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why waste ink on this almost useless fact (other than it perhaps leading to the circumstances of his death) when there's a lot more worth saying about the guy.

      Perhaps because Turing was driven to suicide by an establishment which hounded and bullied him for being gay? By no stretch of the imagination is that a useless fact.

      --
      Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
    4. Re:Turing was also... by eaolson · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Why is that important? Do you list whether or not a person is heterosexual in an article or biography about someone? What about the color of their skin or hair.

      Depends. Was he persecuted for being straight? Did he lose his security clearance, get forced to take massive doses of hormones, and be driven to suicide in spite of his contribution to the WWII war effort?

      Any story that would try to talk about Turing but not even mention such details that were so critically important to his life wouldn't be complete.

    5. Re:Turing was also... by Gannoc · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The article clearly points this fact out, as does every other frikkin' article on Alan Turing, to which the answer should probably be: WHO GIVES A CRAP?

      Because its a big freaking deal. Its not like he was a mathmatician who happened to also be gay on the side. After helping immensely in WW2, and inventing programming, he was forced to admit he was homosexual.

      He was imprisoned as a security risk, and forced to either spend the rest of his life in jail or take hormone injections. He chose the hormone injections. His career was over, and he wasn't allowed to continue to work on the thing he is now famous for. Its strongly suspected that the forced government injections helped drive him to suicide a few years later.

      FORCED GOVERNMENT INJECTIONS to try to stop him from being gay, and therefore easily susceptible to communists.

      I know many people are jaded by political correctness and media hype, but in this case, it is a BIG GODDAMN ISSUE that this guy was gay.

  2. Re:Ah, but is it a real article... by October · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But of course the real point is: could you tell the difference?

  3. Ada Lovelace by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I always though Ada Lovelace was considered to be the first "programmer"

  4. Remember Lady Ada by VernonNemitz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).

  5. Re:Turing was gay and mistreated by society by Enigma_Man · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  6. Re:the Test of time by iworm · · Score: 3, Insightful
    As he defined it the test was actually:
    The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the "imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B.


    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.

  7. Re:Alan Turing: The Movie. by Dusabre · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  8. This guy should be the hero of gay rights. by Gannoc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

  9. He'd turn in his grave by sugarmotor · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Whenever the name Turing comes up, I think he would turn in his grave if he saw what kind of software is being produced today - buffer overflows ... rampant waste of memory and processor time ... Y2K stuff etc.

    He would have been delighted with a 1GHz / 1GB RAM machine and now it is just taken for granted.

    --
    http://stephan.sugarmotor.org