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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.
From Dailyrotten:
June 7 1954 Despondent over court-ordered estrogen treatments to cure his homosexuality, Alan Turing commits suicide by consuming an apple laced with cyanide. Turing is considered the founder of modern computing, a pioneer in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and a crucial member of the team that cracked Germany's Enigma cipher in World War II.
I hate sigs.
Tony Sale's webpage - WW II Codes and Ciphers is well worth a visit also.
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.
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
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.
At first, they gave (male) homosexuals testosterone. After all, they were "too girly", right? Well shit, that just turned them into raging aggressive horny homosexuals. So, since that didn't work, they thought "what the heck, let's do the opposite". They had no clue, but kept experimenting. Never seemed to cross their minds just to leave the poor guys alone.
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
Now, I don't know where you got the idea that he didn't want it to become public knowledge; you're probably just being lazy.
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
Depo-provera, a synthetic form of Progestin, is currently used for this purpose, and referred to as "chemical castration." It is also administered as a means of birth control for women. One of its side effects in women is lowered libido.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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 should clarify... apparently once he went on trial a lot of doors shut to him, that's what I meant. Not that he was ashamed or anything. Perhaps I was being lazy :)
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
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
The real story
Even with Turing's method not every message was broken (or even intercepted). When the Germans changed procedures and even the design of Engima (in the case of the 4-rotor Naval version) the Allies often lost the ability to break the codes for weeks or months at a time. Often it was captured codebooks that allowed the codes to be read. Without Turing's work other ways to gain the required intelligence would have been found.
Even if the Allies had of lost the ability to read Enigma-coded messages entirely it is not clear that it would have lost them the war. It's extremely difficult to assess these sorts of scenarios, of course, but don't forget that Enigma intelligence was only one small part of the intelligence available to the Allies.
Most Enigma cracking during the Battle of the Atlantic was based on captured codebooks, up until the start of February 1942. That is when the German navy switched to the 4-rotor Engima. Little progress was made against that until the capture of the new codebooks from U-559 at the end of October. Bletchley wasn't regularly cracking Enigma again until mid-December. So for 10.5 months during the most intense period of the Battle of the Atlantic no Enigma intelligence was available. Cracking Enigma was a big factor in winning the Battle of the Atlantic but it was not the only factor (radar was another for example), and it is not clear that we would have lost the battle without Engima.Lets not forget that it also has side effects like she can lose her hair, she is constantly depressed and she has her period for 3-4 weeks of every month (which they say is temp until she stops having her period altogether, but i never saw it.) There was a good portion of time there which I was pretty sure the way it prevented pregnancy was by making sure we NEVER had sex. Between the constant bleeding, the low libido, and her never "feeling sexy" thedrug was VERY effective at preventing pregnancy.
Respectfully, Ioslipstream, he didn't just get a parking ticket or something, he *developed breasts*. He was forced to be chemically castrated and put in house arrest after a trial that was little more than public humiliation, slander, and the complete trashing of his character and his life. Some people kill themselves to escape going to jail - what do you think Turing went through?
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
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.
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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.
Note: there is no evidence to indicate that Turing ever worked as an enemy spy, or that the CIA was involved in his death or was even worried about his loyalty. I am only suggesting that, in this case, the CIA would not have been acting out of pure bigotry, but out of a somewhat reasonable fear of exposure.
eikimartinson.com
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?
It's called "Alan Turing Way". It's out to the South East of the city, near the City of Manchester Stadium.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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...
See the image here:
http://www.geektimes.com/michael/techno/computing