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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."
But of course the real point is: could you tell the difference?
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
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.
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.
Here is a nice clickable overview:
History of computers
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.
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.
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.