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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?
"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've read a quite a few things that suggested cold-war surveilance by the british secret service was what drove him to suicide (they were worried that his homosexuality would make him a 'security risk'). IIRC that also led them to remove most of his access to top level work which increased his depression.
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We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
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.
Just FYI, this is a much heralded rumor, but isn't true :
o us .html
http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/scrapbook/wondr
A lot of thought went into the Apple logo and what it signified. The guys over at Apple were very fond of making statements with imagery, design, and color.
Let's not forget that Turing's life was pretty much destroyed when his homosexuality became public knowledge.
AFAIK he was robbed by one of his lovers and when he reported it to the police and they found out the relationship between the two they arrested Turing on charges of Lewd and Immoral Acts. This lead to a persecution that destroyed any chance of his working again, and eventually his life.
Hell of a way to treat a man who saved hundreds, maybe thousands of lives by breaking the Enigma cypher.
Who knows how much more advanced our understanding of AI's might be if it wasn't for institutionalised homophobia?
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
I don't how it's relevant to discuss Alan Turing's sexuality in the context of his contributions to computer science.
Maybe you' dlike to see somthing like this:
BusinessWeek celebrates its anniversary with a series of articles about the great gay and straight 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 gay 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. You'll find the introduction of Turing's profile, plus more details, photographs and references in this overview."
Alan Turing's being gay was certainly an important part of his life. After all, the persectution he suffered contributed to his death. But to have to label him right off the bat everytime his name is uttered is absurd.
In any case, had you read past the title and ad, you'd have come across the FIRST PARAGRAPH which reads:
The rarefied world of early 20th-century mathematics seems light years away from today's PCs and virtual-reality video games. Yet it was a 1936 paper by Cambridge University mathematician Alan M. Turing that laid the foundation for the electronic wonders now crowding into every corner of modern life. In a short and eventful life, Turing also played a vital role in World War II by helping crack Germany's secret codes -- only to be persecuted later for his homosexuality.
Before whining about gay-bias, RTFA.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
It wasn't exactly the removal of access that increased his depression, it probably had more to do with the forceful administration of hormones to cure his 'disease'. Due to these hormones he grew breasts. Not fun. That's the thanks he got for his war efforts and contributions to science.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I always though Ada Lovelace was considered to be the first "programmer"
Ada added notes to Babbage's design of a calculation machine when she translated all his writing. In her notes, she wrote down mathematical steps for getting from point A to point B through the machine - basically describing the states that the machine would be in as it ran. Her writing is very similar to modern programming languages, but also very similar to algebra. While she was probably the first to write a series of algebraic expressions specifically for use on a mechanical calculation machine, she wasn't the first to write the expressions in specific order.
In the end, she couldn't actually program because Babbage never built his machine. Instead, he started taking Ada to the racetrack. She became addicted to gambling and alchohol and died rather young. That whole part is usually left out of the "Ada was the first programmer" stories.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
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...
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 :-)
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.