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:A Great Man

[andy55]

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.

Friend, you are mistaken. "This field" may have "little diversity" in its clothes, hairstyle, and fiction preferences, yes. But, in the arena in the mind, you are very mistaken. I've never seen some beautiful things--come in so many forms--from the minds of tech/CS/math people. It's just that, by mainstream's standards, many of their works and endeavors are dismissed over more glamorous and glittery things such as Britney Spears new video, crap prime time TV, a hot new sports car, a stylish outfit, or looking buf on the beach.

IMHO, it's the artists, super-engineers, and super-scientists/academics who have the most diversity--it's just that, as you no doubt know, that diversity and pusle of life isn't seen with the eyes. It's seen with keen insight into their words, works, and actions. If the people you hang with are truely talented and driven but aren't "diverse" enough for you, then it's because you don't really know them.

Re:Killed by the society he saved.

[Babbster]

Of course, homosexuality isn't something to be "cured", but it was the 50's... not the most tolerant time.

It's too bad we still haven't come far enough, considering a leader of a democratic nation wants to amend the constitution in order to deny rights to the homosexual segment of the population. One has to wonder if President Bush would approve of forcing chemical castration on homosexuals today.

Re:Alan Turing's Machine in Cellular Automata

[nihilogos]

Turing's 1936 paper "On Computable numbers, with an application to the entsheidungsproblem"
was the seminal work on artificial intelligence and computation. Cellular automata are more an outgrowth of this work. They aren't even that different from Turing machines - they maintain a state and have rules for changing that state depending on their neighbours.

And Wolfram certainly hasn't discovered much that's impressed anyone else working in the physics / computer science world.