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Google Quadruples A.M. Turing Award To $1M

Posted by samzenpus on from the sweeten-the-pot dept.

alphadogg writes The Association for Computing Machinery has announced that its annual A.M. Turing Award, sometimes called the Nobel Prize in Computing, will now come with a $1M award courtesy of Google. Previously, the award came with a $250K prize funded by Google and Intel. The award, which goes to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community," is generally doled out in February or March. This past March, the winner was Microsoft Research principal Leslie Lambert. The ACM says the bigger prize should raise the award's visibility.

42 comments

  1. Lamport by Pseudonym · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's Leslie Lamport, not Leslie Lambert. If you didn't know that, then you're not a true LaTeX user.

    --
    sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
    1. Re:Lamport by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I'm just glad that ONE award in computing (and not even one that pays well) finally went to a woman!

    2. Re:Lamport by parallel_prankster · · Score: 1

      Or even somebody whose used locks in programming. Lamport was big there too!

    3. Re:Lamport by Pseudonym · · Score: 3, Informative

      FYI, Barbara Liskov won the Turing Award a few years ago.

      --
      sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
    4. Re:Lamport by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It's good that Ms. Lambert didn't get aced out of her award by men like Rosalind Franklin did.

    5. Re:Lamport by iced_773 · · Score: 1

      And Fran Allen did before that.

    6. Re:Lamport by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      FYI, Leslie Lamport is male.

    7. Re:Lamport by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      FYI, Leslie Lamport is a man.

    8. Re:Lamport by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm a pretty heavy LaTeX user and I actually had no idea he created LaTeX. I just knew about his work on distributed computing. And the Turing award, of course.

    9. Re:Lamport by Mr+Z · · Score: 2

      Indeed!

      A few years back, I was implementing Leslie's Bakery Algorithm. (Which, to be sure, you should look up his original paper, not the bastardizations you sometimes find in textbooks. That paper and more are available here.)

      In my implementation, I wanted to SIMD-ize one of the steps to make it more efficient. I thought the transformation was valid, but wasn't certain, so I emailed Dr. Lamport. I was pleasantly surprised when Leslie actually replied to my email.

      And yes, the transformation was valid. *whew* Our multiprocessor DSP software got a little faster that day.

      Anyway, there's some fascinating stuff on his page full of papers. The link again: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html

      --
      Program Intellivision!
    10. Re:Lamport by slimjim8094 · · Score: 2

      That's quite a beard for a woman

      --
      I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
    11. Re:Lamport by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You cis scum and your labels!

  2. Leslie who? by SBJ95 · · Score: 2

    Leslie LAMPORT, creator of LaTeX, was the last winner. Glad to see there's editing here.

    1. Re:Leslie who? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You two guys really don't know who Leslie Lamport was, do you? Calling out LaTeX as his main claim to fame is a lot like saying Linus Torvalds is best known as the inventor of Git.

    2. Re:Leslie who? by Pseudonym · · Score: 1

      LaTeX is what most slashdotters would be familiar with. In fact, I said it because my copy of LaTeX: A Document Preparation System is only a slight sideways glance away.

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      sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
  3. New directions in well known Bell Labs program by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1


    #include <stdio.h>

    int main()
    {
          int i;
          for (i=0; i<50; i++)
                  printf( "hey! ho! let's go, world!\n" );
          return 0;
    }

    If I win, I'd be willing to share the 1 million USD with the surviving relatives of Joey Ramone, Johnny Ramone, and Dennis Ritchie.

  4. WTF? by Planar · · Score: 2

    Leslie Lambert??? Is this some kind of joke?

    “Editor: A person employed on a newspaper whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.”
    - Elbert Hubbard

    1. Re:WTF? by iced_773 · · Score: 1

      Sometimes I think the editors deliberately put these typos in just to screw with us.

  5. stood on the shoulders of Knuth, creator of Tex by raymorris · · Score: 2

    Lamport, creator of LaTex, just rode the coattails of Donald Knuth, known as the creator of Tex. ;)

    1. Re:stood on the shoulders of Knuth, creator of Tex by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just like Torvalds drew on several years' intensive experience with Bitkeeper to develop Git.

    2. Re:stood on the shoulders of Knuth, creator of Tex by Pseudonym · · Score: 1

      You win.

      --
      sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
    3. Re:stood on the shoulders of Knuth, creator of Tex by rolfwind · · Score: 2

      Knuth won in 1974 though, so fair enough.

      Also, Lamport didn't win for Latex, but for his work on distributed computing.

    4. Re:stood on the shoulders of Knuth, creator of Tex by osu-neko · · Score: 1

      That's the way progress is best made: by standing on the shoulders of giants.

      --
      "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
    5. Re:stood on the shoulders of Knuth, creator of Tex by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      When I program in JavaScript, I feel like I'm standing on the shoulders of midgets.

    6. Re:stood on the shoulders of Knuth, creator of Tex by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When I program in JavaScript, I feel like I'm standing on the shoulders of midgets.

      Wrong body part, and you are not standing on it, but crawling in.

    7. Re:stood on the shoulders of Knuth, creator of Tex by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is how I feel,

      "If I haven't seen as far as others, it's because giants have been standing on my shoulders."
      -- Hal Abelson

    8. Re:stood on the shoulders of Knuth, creator of Tex by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I feel like I'm standing on the knees of web users, facing them.

      Rest of imagery left to your imagination.

  6. AM turing award by rossdee · · Score: 2

    I don't want to get up early in the morning - is there a PM turing award?

  7. Wouldn't it be quintuple? by killfixx · · Score: 0

    Original prize = $250k. New prize, $1m. That's a 300% increase over last year but works out to be 4 times (technically more, they shared the prize with Intel int he beginning) their original contribution.

    --
    "Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
  8. Fuck!! Not being able to edit is killing me!!! by killfixx · · Score: 0

    Disregard my entire drunken comment!!!

    Doh!!

    --
    "Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
    1. Re:Fuck!! Not being able to edit is killing me!!! by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      If only there were a preview button.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:Fuck!! Not being able to edit is killing me!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      so we could get our plurals correct.

    3. Re:Fuck!! Not being able to edit is killing me!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      12 hours later, TFS and the posts that followed aren't one of Slashdot's proudest moments.

  9. Should I... by dohzer · · Score: 1

    Should I turn in my solution now, or wait for just one more increase in prize money? Hmmm....

    1. Re: Should I... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't do it! I don't want a computer to fool me into thinking it's human unless it is required to provide useful, meaningful information or valuable solutions to both novel and everyday problems. And that doesn't mean that I am willing to accept my OS as a potential Platonic lover either.

      I can just imagine what IBM or GE would do with a computer that could converse effectively over any information domain. Douglas Adams' Deep Thought from Restaurant at the End of the Universe would be preferrable to HAL, but we won't see anything close to Robert Heinlein's sentient, altruistic machine intelligence if it flops right into the hands of the likes of Google.

  10. Official Announcement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The linked article is poorly informed, not to mention full of typos.

    Here is the official announcement, straight from the ACM.

  11. Ads in HTML by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Fuck Slashdot.

    Hit CTRL+U and browse the wonderful HTML source code ads.

    Unbelievable that the site has stooped so low.

    I'm off to Pipedot.

  12. Ob by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Lennart Poettering's already decided what to spend it on.

  13. Missed a C? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yeah, wtf. Seems like they missed a C?

    Editing was never a strong suit here, but it is getting even worse.

  14. Maybe the summary is correct! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I suppose it could have gone to this Leslie Lambert:

    http://www.security-innovation...

    Or this one:

    http://leslielambert.com/home....

    Or this one:

    https://www.youtube.com/user/L...

    1. Re:Maybe the summary is correct! by Pseudonym · · Score: 1

      While I have no reason to doubt that the CISO at Juniper is an accomplished IT professional and a nice person, they don't give out Turing Awards for that.

      Let alone the visual arts. Or real estate.

      --
      sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
  15. 6-min video to understand Dr. Lamport's impact by tgeller · · Score: 1

    Here's a video I produced for ACM when Dr. Lamport won the 2013 award:

    https://vimeo.com/95177539

    And here's the brief article from Communications of the ACM:

    http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/6/175174-qa-divide-and-conquer/fulltext

    --
    Tom Geller