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Marking 50 Years Since Alan Turing's Death
erroneous writes "Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Alan Turing: mathematician, code breaker, and computer pioneer. He was today commemorated in his home city of Manchester, UK." Here are stories at the BBC and at The Register.
Forced to take hormones to cure his homosexuality.
He was, in fact, homosexual.
However, I find it tragic and apalling that his life had to end the way it did. With the rampant homophobia in the UK at the time (and, some would say, such feeling still exists, albeit now driven underground), he had no choice but to end his life, else he would face a lifetime of torment and living in the shadows. It's really too bad that otherwise great nations do such stupid things and end up killing their greatest minds. Here's to you, Alan. *clink*
got sig?
Tony Sale's webpage - WW II Codes and Ciphers is well worth a visit also.
[l337_h4x0r] alan d00d r u 4 real?
[aturing@thegreatbeyond.net] Yes.
[l337_h4x0r] u r a b0t.
[aturing@thegreatbeyond.net] Damnit, for the last time, I am not a bot!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Here is another interesting link:
i cians/Turing.html
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathemat
Not only did he (amongst others) crack the German Luftwaffe enigma codes, but those of the German navy, which were far more difficult. His work was pioneering on several fronts. Surely the world is a far better place for his having lived in it.
bash: rtfm: command not found
Here is a link for Alan Turing and his work on ciphering and enigma machines.
Turing test anyone?
404
While the turing machine is an amazing creation, I find the more recent work on Cellular Automata to be an interesting addition to the discoveries that worlfram made years ago.
Cellular automata are desceptively simple rulesets that produce extremely complex patterns - through a rule that can be encoded into a 8 bit number, you can produce Turing machines, as well as chaotic patterns.
To learn more about cellular automata, visit the MathWorld page
Maybe a bit off-topic, but Turing wrote the first chess machine on paper and played a well known player of his age. He always aimed to be a good player, but never quite got the hang of it. Guess we all have our own skills!
If you care to read then feel free to look: here,the official biography if you don't know a lot about alan turing, just thought it would come in handy for some people. And, he definitely did make some decent contributions to our world. Who knows what our world would be like without him, some of his contributions to code / code breaking were very important, read the short biography on the site above, it can't hurt.
The article makes it seem like Turing has been adopted as the cause celebre of gay rights activists, and is memorialized for his lifestyle and his tragic death rather than his amazing accomplishments in mathematics. How fucked up is that?
I must wander down there some time... that it's of him holding the apple that killed him is rather thought provoking.
However I can find an Alan Turing Road in Guildford but nothing in Manchester as the article implies.
Right up there with Shaun Ryder and Ian Brown. And that guy from the Inspiral Carpets, whatsisface.
I guess not. Let's see what they're saying about this anniversary on the SomethingAwful forums...
--Leo
...one of the labs was named after him; he was a student there back before he was famous. However, the weirdness is that it was a biology lab, not a computing or math lab. D'oh!
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Contrary to popular belief, mal_vu didn't really pass a Turing test -- she would have had to fool real people as well as FBI agents.
Hey guys! This is one of those few stories on Slashdot where we can talk about nazis without anyone invoking Godwin's law!
The city of Manchester would ask that you avoid eating the apples.
Well, the statue they made for him does feature the apple.
I wonder if that's how Jobs, Woz, and Co. got their name? At very least, they must have known about the connotation. It seems kind of sick to me.
50 years since Turing's death... 50 hours since Reagan's death...
Coincidence? Well, yeah, probably.
Despite my tacky tone, I have always thought that his statue was one of the most reflective/thoughtful pieces of art I've ever seen. It's well done, if you don't know the story - but it is astounding the amount of reflection and thought that must be going through the man's mind as he stares at the apple.
meh
I don't know how it is in more diverse places, but it often seems like I'm the only gay man majoring in Computer Science, and I remember years ago it was such a relief to find that arguably the most recognized name in the field was gay.
Although the nature of his persecution and suicide are unfortunate, I'm somewhat glad of the fact that it's often talked about--things like this and worse are still happening in many parts of the world.
That said, I prefer not to dwell on it. I am merely grateful that I and others have such a man to look up to in a field that so often seems at present to have so little diversity.
Here's to Alan Turing, a Great Man.
SELECT quote.text AS sig FROM quote NATURAL JOIN attribute WHERE attribute.description = 'witty';
0 rows returned
..there's no umlaut in Türing!
Turing buried some silver bars for safekeeping during the war, but forgot where he buried them.
Interestingly Rejewski made it first to France (where his work on Enigma continued) and then to Britain. Where his talents were wasted and he was apparently shocked after the war to learn what had gone on at Bletchley. After the war he went back to Poland and worked in a factory.
It seems cryptanalysts often got the short end of the stick, alas.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
For spanish speakers, take a look at
:-D
site1
site2
Btw, how many programs try to hack the turing machine?
- Slayer_X
http://www.slayerx.org/
Lima
...as we know them today. Turing believed that machines could be created that would mimic the processes of the human brain. He acknowledged the difficulty people would have accepting a machine to rival their own intelligence, a problem that still plagues artificial intelligence today.
He likened new technology devices such as cameras and microphones to parts of the human body and his views often landed him in heated debates with other scientists.
Turing believed an intelligent machine could be created by following the blueprints of the human brain. He wrote a paper in 1950 describing what is now known as the Turing Test.
The test consisted of a person asking questions via keyboard to both a person and an intelligent machine. He believed that if computer's answers could not be distinguished from those of the person after a reasonable amount of time, the machine was somewhat intelligent. This test has become a standard measure of the artificial intelligence community.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
I wonder if that's how Jobs, Woz, and Co. got their name? At very least, they must have known about the connotation. It seems kind of sick to me.
Jobs used to work in an apple orchard. One time, in frustration over the ability of anyone at the company to come up with a name, he said, "I'm calling this company Apple Computer until someone can come up with a better name by the end of the day!"
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
I remember walking out of the college course where I was first told about Turing machines. It gave me a lot of satisfaction when I told my friends that God is a Turing Machine. So There!
There's nothing more to it. There was a legal battle between Apple the record label and Apple Computer, but Apple were allowed to keep the name provided they didn't move into the recording industry. It remains to be seen what their response to iTunes is going to be.
Poison Apple Computer
Or read Neal Stephensons Cryptonomicon... Actually quite a good book.
Shouldn't we be celebrating his birthdate?
And then go find the actual info and see that it was a British crew (not American), tracking down an entirely different submarine (U-110).
As they say at the beginning of the movie "This is a work of fiction".
I just wanted to post in homage to the guy. I have difficulty calling anyone my hero, but if I did put people in such a position, Alan would be there.
It's terrible that the world saw more value in vilifying him as a homosexual than eulogizing him as a genious.
Is there not ONE story on this site that we can have a modicum of decency in the comments?
Welcome to Slashdot!
You are new here, don't you?
I mean the Lincoln memorial doesn't have a giant stone John Wilkes Booth creeping up on him...
Maybe you Brits are just more morbid than us.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
From the turings of our time, a little story about their meeting to commemorite A. T.
As can be seen by the comment at the top of page now (9:48 EDT), Turing commited suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple. Re-read the comment and decide again if you think it's offtopic (don't forget offtopic/overrated lower karma while funny doesn't raise it)
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.")
I've read that Turing picked a poison apple to end his life because it symbolized eating the apple from the tree of knowledge that Adam & Eve were forbidden from doing (and subsequently died from) in the christian (& jewish?) bible. Anyone else hear this before?
As brilliant as he was, I don't get why Turing thought that mimicking the human brain would be a step toward intelligence. Sometimes I think the best way for a computer to prove intelligence would to not act like humans....
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
Oh, and BTW I'm an American.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
...the Turist Trap?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
If the post is good, why should it be modded down you idiot?
Typical American attitude. Bitch and complain about anything and everything for no reason.
Steve Jobs had worked during the summer at an apple farm, and admired the Beatles' record label, Apple. He also believed Apples to be the most perfect fruit. He and Steve Wozniak were trying to figure out a name for their new company, and they decided that if they couldn't think of one by the end of the day that was better than Apple, they would choose Apple. They couldn't think of anything better, so on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer, Inc. was born.
But they needed a logo. The first design included Sir Isaac Newton, a tree and a banner that said "Apple Computer." Jobs decided they needed a less busy logo, one that would signify a brand. The second logo attempt was very similar to the current logo, but without the bite taken out of it. Jobs thought this logo looked too much like an orange. The third attempt was the logo that Apple still uses.
There are photos of his statue here and here. Having seen these, I think I should go and see it in person some day.
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
so he was gay. big deal.
For gay men like me, these days, in an increasingly civilised society, its not such a big deal. I can't yet marry a partner and its legal for me to be sacked because I am gay, but its not too bad.
But within my lifetime, it has been a very big deal. Forty years ago, I would have been imprisoned as a criminal. Isn't that a big deal?
For Alan Turing it was such a big deal it lead to his death.
Think of all that we lost; all he could have given us, because in his time it was a big deal.
Why is the software icon displayed for a science post? nit? pick!
Have you carried out a lot of research on this? I would think surveys would be unlikely to give reliable results, at least it anyone remembers what happened to Turing.
I didn't notice anyone mention it, but the real reason he was caught was he told the truth to some bobbies (cops, that is), while reporting a theft. Oops.
Me neither.
On another note, King's College, Cambridge maintains AMT's papers, some being available online.
Please honor his memory and love a fag today.
[o]_O
Certainly that's part of it for some people, but I've had gay male friends who grew up acting in an effeminate way starting in childhood, and began to wonder if they were gay because of that, and only later discovered a strong sexual preference for the same sex.
The moral being that there's many kinds of people in the world, and a single explanation rarely accounts for all differences. Including biology -- and also that there seem to be multiple biological reasons for these things.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
The real story
Just think of all the time he wasted earning a PhD!
I wonder if any of the U.S. military's gay Arabic translators would have translated the warning about the next big terrorist attack if they hadn't been fired by the Bush administration just for being gay?
I guess we'll never know.
Silly Rabbit, sigs are for kids.
Makes you wonder exactly what the hell had been stolen, to make him inclinded to say anything...
Doubtless the people at Bletchley could have done many things without Turing.. eventually, but would they have done it in sufficient time? The intelligence game during WWII was a race against time and the information was important enough to lend credence to the argument that without Turing the war may have been lost.
My Blog
I meant it as "yes, it is a coincidence", which is true. But I guess you could see it the other way - "yes, there is a connection". Funny that I get modded to +5 for an ambiguous one-word comment . :-)
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I work in intelligent robotics. The turing test is nonsense. It tests if you can create a electronic clone of the current human answerer, not 'intelligence'.
Consider this, a human 4 year is intelligent by most people's measures. However, if you were to replace me with a 4 year old in a turing test, it would be obviously not myself and thus, not 'intelligent'.
Similarly, if the turing test was conducted in chinese, and you asked me to fill in the part of the computer, I would also fail it.
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Does anyone remember when one of the Enigma machines was stolen from Bletchley Park? Well, it is quite an amusing story (Aging BBC Link), about how it ended up in the hands of Jeremy Paxman after a nationwide manhunt. I just think it goes to show (and also perhaps defies one of the "why bother remembering Turing" posts from above) that Station X, Turing and Bletchley Park are still very much at the forefront of the British psyche. However, on the other side of the coin, and I think others may have posted something to the same effect, but the Government has little or no interest in the history surrounding Bletchley Park (Bletchley Park Official Website - Fund Request), and so this place is a dilapidated mess. Such a terrible, terrible shame.
I know more about the Turing character in Cryptonomicon than I do about the real man. Any recommended books?
Finkployd
Funniest "insensitive clod" ever!
There is nothing wrong with homosexuality, but I'll be damned if I take it up the ass from GB & Co. for another 4 years. You might like it that way, but for many of us, it's rape.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I remember learning about his life and death some years ago, when I was new to the field, just starting school. How many geniuses died early or tragically? Niels Henrik Abel, Oliver Heaviside, Srinivasa Ramanujan...
What enraged me even more than the injustice of it all, the stupid, pointless unfairness, was the fact that he was well in the middle of his most productive years. Who knows what he would have come up with if he hadn't been hounded to death?
It is as if Isaac Newton had been struck down in the middle of his life---how much would physics have lost? How dare they! I believe that we shall not see his like again.
By Turing's death, we are all diminished.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
A Mancunian is someone from Manchester.
A Manchurian is someone from Manchuria in Northeast Asia.
Besides which, the Inspiral Carpets are from Northwich in Cheshire.
"In 1990 Hugh Loebner agreed with The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies to underwrite a contest designed to implement the Turing Test. Dr. Loebner pledged a Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's. Each year an annual prize of $2000 and a bronze medal is awarded to the most human computer. The winner of the annual contest is the best entry relative to other entries that year, irrespective of how good it is in an absolute sense."
Further information on the development of the Loebner Prize and the reasons for its existence is available at Loebner's web site.
actually, this concept is being actively challenged, much in the same way the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder was a few decades ago.
One side wants it dropped from the DSM-IV because transsexuality is a natural condition while the other wants it to stay so that national health plans pay for hormones and surgery.
I have even heard it bandied about that Alan Turing may have been transgender - back in the 1940s the distinction between gay and TG was not well drawn. I have not heard of any evidence to back that claim up.
Turing's time was fantastic, just imagine two 'monsters' like Turing and Godel working toghether!
ie) Turing liked to view 'intelligent' systems as complex formal systems, when asked about how 'free' or 'creative' behaviour could emerge from a formal system, he simply stated than error conditions on physical objects are also inavoidable, so although formal systems are of course deterministic, no real implementation can be said to be free of defects, and so it cannot be said to be fully deterministic..
What's in a sig?
What's in a sig?
Actually, he wrote a pretty influential paper on the Turing hydra where he described how a reaction/diffusion mechanism could give rise to stable standing wave pattern of concentrations - that is, if your hydra had its head connected to its tail, and you didn't mind infinite concentrations. Still, this was the basis of quite a few theories of the formation of patterns such as zebra stripes.
Although most of these models of these are almost certainly wrong (eg. a simple double gradient probably controls hydra formation)- it was a good idea...
Hollywood != true
Jeez, you'd think it would be on the news or something ...
both of these fellows were also around at Bletchley Park, and definitely had a lot to contribute to the foundation of modern computing. VonNeuman with his architecture description of a computing machine, as well as Shannon's work on grammars, regular expressions, etc.
Incidentially, the early (1980's) Apple Computer rainbow logo roughly corresponds to the rainbow flag symbol used by the gay community.
Another coincidence, eh?
That's one element of privilege by the way: being able to casually mention your significant other without fear of prejudice.
Another element is to be able to sit back and say "gee, is there really disparity out there? Show me the research." If you are a minority you experience the disparity every day. You don't need yet another damn study.
Being a member of a privileged class isn't "bad" or "evil". But it is important to recognize when one is a member and do what one can from that position of power to help bring real equality to society. Like posting (hopefully) thought provoking things like this to slashdot.
The turing test is nonsense. It tests if you can create a electronic clone of the current human answerer, not 'intelligence'.
Um, no. It tests if it is possible to tell which of the human and the machine is the human, not if it is possible to tell them apart. A Turing test in which the human played the part of an educated New Yorker, and the machine responded like a barely literate Asian immigrant, might still result in the machine being identified as the human, if it responded sufficiently realistically.
Similarly, if the turing test was conducted in chinese, and you asked me to fill in the part of the computer, I would also fail it.
On the contrary. A human responding with "I'm sorry, I don't understand", and "Don't you speak English?", might well be more convincing to a Chinese observer than a computer attempting to write Chinese and producing nonsense and non-sequiturs. (Or was that meant to be a clever reference to the Chinese Room rebuttal of the Turing test?)
Since you have demonstrated that you fail to understand the whole point of the Turing test, allow me to explain. It is not intended as the One True Arbiter of Intelligence. Turing never claimed that anything which passed his test would be intelligent, or that anything which failed would not be intelligent.
What the test shows is that it may make sense to describe as intelligent anything which is able to mimic the behaviour of something known to be intelligent sufficiently well as to be indistinguishable from the real thing: that is, if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it may be reasonable, as a working hypothesis, to assume that it's a duck.
I think he meant, a turing test in chinese where he was the computer and a native chinese speaker was the human. Which wouldn't be a turing test, becuase the whole point of a turing test is that the computer is a computer, so he's still being stupid, and his edxample doesnt make any valid point about the turing test, but you're wrong about how.
that is just wrong in so many ways.
You can get sacked for being gay? Where do you live? Is it specific to your job or can you be sacked no matter what line of work you're in?
The "dead at" troll generator in your sig doesn't select between a/an properly. So you get such lines as "an belgian icon", "an chinese icon" etc.
Has anyone hacked or emulated the turing machine, or the enigma device? Does linux compile on it yet? :)
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Of course the ironic thing is that the casting of the statue had to be outsourced to China because of insufficient donations and the absence of corporate sponsors.
See my journal, I write things there
I don't have cites on hand and the studies were done years ago, so they've probably been disproven and labelled as propaganda, but I seem to remember one study showing that homosexuality increased as a population became more crowded, rabbits in this case. Another popular study showed a high correlation between homosexuality and a certain late rush of horomones while in the womb. Even if the second one is right, I don't think it would be accepted as it suggests a physical link, and one that could be correctable.
Personally, I figure there's some degree of genetics and/or environmental triggers that leave us with a certain predisposition towards varying levels of heterosexuality and homosexuality and after that, a lot of people pick one side or the other from social pressure and a belief that you're either one or the other.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Anyone else find it odd that in US society, there is a "black" culture? Go to England. Oddly enough, being black doesn't mean you talk differently whether it's funny accents or bizarre vocabulary. They sound just like everyone else... so yes, there is a black behavior, which gives your post an odd kernel of truth other than that which I think you intended.
And yes, I probably should post this with my name rather than anonymously. *shrug* I don't feel like losing Karma for expressing controversial opinions.
No, the point is that such a test does not necessarily demonstrate intelligence. Its definition of intelligence is limited to the ability to clone a particular human answerer.
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You can get sacked for being gay?
yes
Where do you live?
UK
Is it specific to your job or can you be sacked no matter what line of work you're in?
Its not specific.
Things should change in a few years, with the European Human Rights Act coming into effect, but there will still be exclusion for some areas, such as religious organisations. I could be a highly competent and respected teacher in a school, and the school gets taken over by some religious group and I get sacked. All perfectly legal.
its legal for me to be sacked because I am gay
Seriously? You should move to a more civalised continent. We might have done the dirty on Turing fifty years ago but unlike the United States, we in the U.K have actually managed to move on the previous fifty years.
I'm from the UK and I've never heard of this. Are you sure you couldn't request an industrial tribunal on the grounds that it's unfair dismissal? You may still be out of a job but you'd be compensated at least.
I don't doubt what you're saying but I'm having a tough time believing it's not a punishable offence for an employer to sack people simply for being gay.
One in eight US children and teenagers takes an anti-depressive or attention-improving amphetimine. There have been a slew of recent articles in newspapers debating whether this works. We create life-long customers for the drug companies early on in the US :-)
I should be so hypocritical. Alcohol, caffine, tobacco, and weed are widely used to improve mood. I consume two of these myself.
Intelligence is defined by consensus anyway. An intelligent ape is still not intelligent by human standards. Intelligence is relative to the surroundings. That's why the IQ test uses a baseline of 100 for the "average person". By comparing a computer to an average human, you can see if the computer has average human intelligence.
I've always considered intelligence the ability to deduct valid conclusions from source data. That's something a computer should be able to do. It's why we can build chess machines that beat the world champion. Just because people understand exactly how the machine works doesn't make it non-intelligent, since it's proven that it is intelligent enough in the field of chess. What if you build a machine that is intelligent enough in all fields that could possibly be expected to come up in normal conversation? Wouldn't that be "humanlike" intelligence?
Modern computers resulted from foundational mathematical questions of consistency, completeness, and calculability that were of great concern 100 years ago... It did not result because of the Turing test. Turing was one of many great mathematicians that played a part in the beginings of modern computer science. Other greats include:
1. Georg Cantor (1845-1918): created set theory and other mathematical things that led to paradoxes. Just as important, he created a certain proof technique known as diagonalization, which would prove to be an extremely important tool many years later.
2. L.E.J. Brouwer (1881-1966): created the programme of mathematical Intuitionism, a formulation of mathematics founded on constructivist ideals as a backlash against "unreliable" forms of mathematical reasoning used at the time such as the excluded middle, completed infinities, etc.
3. David Hilbert (1862-1943): started the programme of metamathematics as a backlash against Brouwer's Intuitionism. Hilbert wanted to keep concepts such as the exluded middle, completed infinities, etc... He laid out a series of problems to be solved in order to show that such concepts were safe to use mathematically.
4. Kurt Gödel (1906-1978): influential because he proved that one of Hilbert's goals was impossible - formal axiomatic mathematics could not be proven to be consistent. His proof used Cantor's diagonalization technique.
5. Alonzo Church (1903-1995): proved that certain supposedly mathematical things could not be calculated (using Cantor's diagonalization proof technique). He also created the first general purpose programming language, the lambda-calculus. At the time it was intended to be a formal mathematical language for describing calculation. However, it was a full fledged computational model. He also answered (via Church's Thesis) the foundational mathematical question of "What is computable"? Finally, he was a teacher of future greats: Turing and Kleene.
6. Alan Turing (1912-1954): Student of Church. He reaffirmed Church's thesis in more humanistic terms by defining a formal abstraction of a human carrying out mathematical calculations by hand with unlimited pencil and paper (i.e. a Turing machine). He reaffirmed Church's thesis by proving that a Turing machine could compute whatever the lambda-calculus could compute, and that the lambda-calculus could compute whatever Turing machines could compute.
So that is the high-level ultra-basic overview of how modern computer science started. It is far more complicated, and many more great mathematicians were involved, but those 6 people were the prominent ones. An interesting thing to note is that these guys most likely didn't set out to create computers as we know them today - proof that even great men can't grasp the effect they will have on the world. If you haven't heard of every one of these guys before, then I suggest this book "The Universal Computer", which is an easy read that shows how mathematicians ended up creating computer science.
You're absolutely right. I apologize for letting one of my personal bugaboos from shining through. It would have been perhaps better to say "nutter religious fundamentalists."
As far as relevance to the conversation I shouldn't have just tagged that line onto the end of my post. I think what I was trying to convey at the time was that religious or superstitious beliefs are often manifested in medical practice and policy, even in the modern day U.S. There is a tendency to the medicalization of culturally unacceptable behaviors.
While we often see this in fundamentalist Christian attitudes towards homosexuality (and stem cell research, the "war" on drugs, and a host of other issues), that particular group should not be singled out, although the present degree of their politcal power in the U.S. at present brings their beliefs to the fore. However, this certainly doesn't exempt good old secular humanists from effecting medical policy and practice based on beliefs rather than science. Others have pointed out the growing trend in what might be over-medicating children for questionable diseases such as ADD and depression which are fine examples. Another would be reluctance of the medical community to understand the full extent of AIDS in the early 80s choosing to think that it was a "gay disease."
The "obesity epidemic" is one particular meme that seems to be effecting medical policy and practice on a global level. Here in particular we see a cultural intolerance of what should be a neutral descriptor ("fat") fueling a massive amount of questionable research (based mostly on correlative evidence often funded by special interest groups) driving public policy.
Singling out just religious fundamentalists for my scorn is more revealing of my personal biases than accurate or relevant, as all cultures have a tendency toward instantiating their norms and mores into medical policy and practice. Thanks for calling BS on that line in my post.
ANAL
but we wouldn't be where we are today if those events in the past hadn't taken place.
I dont want to dwell on this. Only to say that you are in danger of accepting a dangerous philosophy!
Your statement is not valid. We could be where we are or ahead of where we are now if things were different. I had this very argument with a work colleague. In fact Turing is a perfect example of how English society almost screwed up a man before he had the chance to blossom.
It is by pure look that he got the chance to make his mark. So many others were less fortunate. Who knows what they could have achieved. Mankind - always taking a step ckwards before 2 forward, and in some ways not taking any steps for a long time!!
Indeed. I first began pondering the question after writing a simple robot program that caused a robot to drive away from obstacles. I attempted to trap the robot with some boxes but it moved in a way I didnt expect and escaped. Were it an animal, I'd think it clever.
Of course, I knew after some thought precisely why it happened, since I designed it - but it made me think, is the appearance of intelligence different than actual intelligence? One of the many human AI issues we see is that it'll never be good enough, because we tend to raise the bar higher and higher for 'intelligence' as milestones are met.
I don't like that though. I think intelligence should be a very loosely defined term. Certainly many animals have more demonstrable intelligence than say, a human infant or toddler. Anyone with a pet can say they find their pet intelligent, to an extent.
I don't think a machine will ever truly replicate a human to a satisfactory degree. There will always be some nuance of it that isn't quite natural. Sort of like those psychologists who've done studies on robot physical shapes, particularly faces. Humans tend to find them uncanny and disconcerting because they're not quite right. I think thats because in order to be human enough, you need to be human.
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The US was in fact founded by protestants. Look at the legal system of the US and you can find lots of it based on laws and how to render judgement that are in the bible.
that's right, all of the above posters make excellent points. A specific bird species to note is the african bee-eater. Wolf packs, too exhibit similar strategy; only the alpha male and female produce cubs, the other wolves help rear them.
Here's the Darwinian thing the original poster missed out on (by only looking at the surface and not thinking too deeply about the issue): Diversity and sample size. Any species with as large and complex a population as ours is going to mathematically have a certain percentage of different mating/sexual/child-rearing behaviours crop up. (As well as tons of other life strategies.) It is inevitable in a population of several billion complex individuals. Some will be gay as per the sliding scale, some will be Michael Jackson, etc.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
Name some things that are intelligent but not human. The meaning of 'intelligent' is pretty bound up up with the notion of human. It means being able to do the sorts of things humans do or try to do (though I'd have to tighten that up to exclude achievements like running fast). We simply have no other model for intelligence. Saying "I don't get why Turing thought that mimicking the human brain would be a step toward intelligence" is absurd, and I'd almost go as far as to say it doesn't really have a meaning. It does, however, carry a connotation. It makes me think that maybe you are a misanthrope.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Unfortunately, I suppose I didn't phrase for people to read it that way...
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
You're right; I'd never heard his story, but he looks pretty tragic: father dies, he flunks his entrance exams, and eventually dies at twenty after being left in a field with a bullet wound at the losing end of a duel. That is tragic.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Two people have pointed it out at the same time. Clearly, Galois has his place in the 'tragic mathematician' pantheon. ... and holy green gargleblaster, is your UID seventy-one? Do you get, like, a t-shirt for that?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
From recent correspondance...
e s.gov/research_room/foia_reading _room/foia_reading_room.html
Joking aside, my real interest is with Alan Turing's death. Mysterious at best. When I started my search you came up, so this letter. I have always thought the CIA (or whatever they were called back in 1954) killed him off for obvious reasons. Now documents have been released and a lot of them on Nazis and CIA connections. Here's a quote from a yahoo news article on the topic which I have taken the liberty of sending to you...
 
The government "dishonored the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and American soldiers who died," said Elizabeth Holtzman, member of a government-appointed group studying millions of pages of files from that era.
Reinhard Gehlen, for example, was recruited by the CIA (news - web sites) after World War II because he was chief of army intelligence for the Nazis on the Eastern Front, where most of the mass killings of Jews occurred. Gehlen was undoubtedly involved in the brutal interrogation of Russian prisoners of war, Holtzman said.
I went to the gov site and was completely lost, wished I were a librarian and you came up 4th in a meta crawler search. Here's there link. I am almost willing to bet cash on there being a link in there on his death.
http://www.archives.gov/iwg/
http://www.archiv
I hope you think Turing was important enough to help out in a search to clear his name as a suicide. I know how to search the web so that is what I am doing, but those gov freedom of Information places overwhelm me. Do you have a bit of time to help out?
"Where did this apple come from?"
--Alan Turing