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.

Comments

Re:Killed by the society he saved.

[RabidOverYou]

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.

Not really *but*

[BlightThePower]

whenever talk of WW2 codebreaking comes up, I do wish the Polish were more often given proper respect for their contribution, in particular the work of Marian Rejewski. He was the first to figure out the details of the commerical (class D) engima machine and was instrumental in constructing the first code breaking machines ('Bombas', hence the British and American use of the similar term, 'Bombes')

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.

Turing's AI studies probably created computers...

[Angry Black Man]

...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.

Insightful? Bah. Of course Insightful != Factual

[Zen Programmer]

The real story