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Honoring Alan Turing, "Father of Computer Science"
alphadogg writes "Google's Vint Cerf and others are spearheading celebrations in Silicon Valley and the UK this month to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing's birth. 'The man challenged everyone's thinking,' says Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist, in an interview with Network World. 'He was so early in the history of computing, and yet so incredibly visionary about it.' Cerf — who is president-elect of the Association for Computing Machinery and general chair of that organization's effort to celebrate the upcoming 100th anniversary of Turing's birth on June 23 — says that it's tough to overstate the importance of Turing's role in shaping the world of modern computing. Turing's accomplishments included his breakthrough Turing machine, cracking German military codes during WWII and designing a digital multiplier called the Automated Computing Machine."
Okay, well that last one sounds a little more implausible than the rest--granted.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
'The man challenged everyone's thinking,' says Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist, in an interview with Network World.
No wonder he was driven to suicide. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Death
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I wonder if they'll mention his persecution by the British government for being gay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_turing#Conviction_for_indecency
How we reward our heroes in this world...
I've requested a Google doodle for Alan Turing's birthday for a couple years now. I'm just glad to hear they'll finally put one up.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Turing didn't just help with practical computers. A lot of his ideas mattered in many other fields. For example, his idea of the Turing machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine and related work was vital to a lot of other fields such as the rise of theoretical computer science, and even as far as the study of equations with integer solutions (called Diophantine equations) in the form of Hilbert's Tenth Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_tenth_problem.
Essentially, Hilbert asked whether there was a general algorithm to determine whether a given equation in integer variables had a solution. Even for individual equations figuring this out can be very difficult. For example it was known even in ancient times that x^2+y^2=z^2 had infinitely many integer solutions, but it took Fermat to show that x^4+y^4=z^4 did not. It turned out that there is no general way of answering these sorts of questions. The problem was solved by lot of people, especially Julia Robinson, Martin Davis, , Hilary Putnam, and ultimately finished off by Yuri Matiyasevich. The solution was to show that one can actually model an arbitrary Turing machine as a system of Diophantine equations, where the machine halting is equivalent to the Diophantine equations having a solution. Thus, if one can solve that one can answer whether any given Turing machine can halt, which Turing showed could not be done in general, using a clever trick- this is known as the Halting theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem. Curiously, the equivalent problem over the rationals is still open, and is turning out to be connected to deep issues in topology and the theory of elliptic curves. So Turing's ideas and thoughts are still pushing us forward and making us ask new questions.
Has anyone noticed this before.... just sayin.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Despite your implication, there is no "persecuted genius" (a /. reader wish-fulfillment dream for sure) story here. I mean, he was a genius, of that there is no doubt, and he was persecuted, but they weren't really connected. Even in his own lifetime his work was honored and well-received. Where the persecution comes in, is in the conviction for homosexual indecency, and having his security clearance (and thus, most of his ability to continue working) revoked, and being subjected to court-ordered chemical castration. But to know about that, you'd have to scroll up on the wikipedia page.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Please also remember, that he was driven into suicide by the nation he protected because he just was who he was. He had done nobody harm but was convicted because others decided what was morally acceptable between consenting adults.
Remember the talent we lost to bigotry :-(.
To be fair, that all happened 60 years ago and many of those rules (including the ones making homosexuality illegal) are long gone. So too are virtually all the people involved (and the ones still alive are certainly no longer in a position to do much about it). About the only thing we can do now is say that it was a terrible shame that he died so young, and celebrate what he did achieve.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Nah, during the fifties it was illegal to be cheerful, too.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Charles Babbage & Ada Lovelace?
For you young whipper-snappers:
Ken
Blaming Britain today for the unfortunate event is no different than blaming America today for their support of slavery and then segregation. Cultures change. We're really rather embarassed about it now.
I neither owned slaves nor supported segregation. I have nothing to be embarrassed about on that score. The fact that I was born (due to no conscious decision of my own) geographically near the locations in which other people once did these things seems like a really bizarre thing to be embarrassed about.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Interesting that a title like "Google's chief Internet evangelist" sounded so cool in 2000 now sounds so completely dorky.
The future is so 1999.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Von Neumann was much more influential than Turing. Not only did von Neumann do brilliant work in multiple areas of mathematics, he invented modern computer architecture. Babbage's design was more like a Jacquard loom card reader coupled to a calculator. Turing's theoretical machine had to roll a long tape back and forth, and the cryptographic machines were essentially hard-wired or plugboard-programmed. Those machines are closer in concept to Hollerith/IBM tabulators of the 1920s to 1950s.
Von Neumann got computer architecture right. He saw that the right answer was RAM, with programs and data in the same memory: The device requires a considerable memory. While it appeared that various parts of this memory have to perform functions which differ somewhat in their nature and considerably in their purpose, it is nevertheless tempting to treat the entire memory as one organ, and to have its parts even as interchangeable as possible for the various functions enumerated above."
He also figured out that 1) everything inside the machine should be binary, not decimal, 2) memory sizes should be a power of two, 3) about 2^18 bits of RAM were needed to get any useful work done, 4) delay-line memory would work in the short term, but "iconoscope" memory (see Williams tube), which is random access, would be better, and 5) what a reasonable instruction set should look like.
I don't think Alan Turing qualifies as the "Father" of computer science
Long before Alan Turing, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace had already done incredible things with the Difference Engine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
No offence to Mr. Turing's fanbois, but we need to give credit to where the credit is truly due
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Here's some illustrative quotes from the article:
For example, in spite of claims that persons with same-sex attraction (SSA) are ‘born that way’ and can’t change, there is no scientific evidence that to back up these assertions,[1] and plenty of evidence that SSA is rooted in early negative experiences[2] and that change is possible.[3] Many teenagers who think they might be “gay” discover later they aren’t.
The last claim is true. Sexuality is confusing, and a lot of teenagers might think they're X when really they're Y, or even Z. Having more knowledge about the spectrum of human sexual behaviour just helps them solve their confusion quicker. Everything else in that paragraph is just plain bullshit.
Sexually transmitted diseases are rampant in the gay community. Since 1981, 300,000 MSM have died of AIDS, and 6,000 are expected to die this year and every year for the foreseeable future. According to the CDC, in 2008, 17,940 MSM were diagnosed with HIV infections, an increase of 17% from 2005. MSM accounted for 53% of all new infections. MSM are 44 to 86 times more likely to be diagnosed HIV positive than men who don’t.
Do you know why those health statistics use the term MSM (Men who have Sex with Men)? Because they encompass everything from gay and proud fashion designers who live in San Fransisco and attend pride, right down to conservative, anti-gay, religious leaders, so deep in the closet they might as well be in Narnia. If homosexuals/bisexuals were not forced by public opinion into hiding and marginalizing their sexual behaviour (and despite how gay and free the big cities are, it's still a thing in most countries, even the most progressive ones), it would be safer, much more like heterosexual dating patterns.
Did you know that as among abstinence only taught straight teens, sex remains just as high, yet condom usage falls much lower, and anal sex rates increase because girls think that preserving their hymens somehow maintains their "virginity".
This has diverted attention from Savage’s objective: promoting his “It gets better,” campaign, the purpose of which is to encourage confused and troubled teenagers to ‘come out’ and experiment with homosexuality.
Anyone with basic comprehension skills will realize within moments of reading/watching an "It Get's Better" testimonial that it has NOTHING to do WHATSOEVER with "converting" or "corrupting" young people into trying something they might not normally do, and EVERYTHING to do with telling young LGBT people who need to deal with fuckhead parents and communities with attitudes like yours, that they shouldn't despair, and definitely SHOULD NOT commit suicide, but rather soldier on till they become independent adults, then GTFO that cow town, and into the big city.
What? A UTM is a mathematical model of a computer; yes, even your beloved parallel computers can't do anything fundamentally different to a UTM. The guy wasn't suggesting it as a programming paradigm, he was using it to prove things about Computability.