Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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!
Except that it has one teeny tiny problem of being a major factor in the man's life. It's why he committed suicide -- it's like trying to talk about Frederick Douglass without mentioning that he was multiracial.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
Or maybe a computer indistinguishable from Turing ...
The real story
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.
Relgious-based intolerance was the root cause, not homosexuality. There is no problem with homosexuality if you live in a tolerant society, just as there are no problems with being black or a woman if you live in an enlightened society--not that we do, but you get the point.
And by the way, if you think it's on-topic just because it's sort-of, half-way, in part related to the real cause, do you also think it is on-topic for me to point out that G. Dubya Bush was an alcoholic coke fiend who has the IQ of a two-by-four every time there is an article about him anywhere?
Homosexuality didn't cause Turing's death any more than Bush's drug addictions caused him to be perhaps the stupidest elected official of modern times.
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 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.
-
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 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.
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...
Incidentially, the early (1980's) Apple Computer rainbow logo roughly corresponds to the rainbow flag symbol used by the gay community.
Another coincidence, eh?
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.