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Turing Manuscript Sells For $1 Million

Posted by samzenpus on from the compensation-game dept.

itwbennett writes A 56-page notebook manuscript by Alan Turing, the English mathematician considered to be the father of modern computer science, was sold at auction Monday for $1.025 million. Turing apparently wrote in the notebook in 1942 when he was working in Bletchley Park, England, trying to break German military code. “It gives us insight into how Alan Turing tackles problems. Sadly it shows us what he never got to finish,” said Cassandra Hatton, senior specialist at Bonhams.

44 comments

  1. Was it complete? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    n/t

    1. Re:Was it complete? by bugs2squash · · Score: 0

      That is an outstanding first post - well done that A.C

      --
      Nullius in verba
    2. Re:Was it complete? by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Well, I checked the first few pages and conclude that th

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    3. Re:Was it complete? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      n/t

      No.

    4. Re:Was it complete? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm not positive, but I've found several other notebooks that look similar, and were in fact quite complete - so it appears by best guess that possibly this should be considered complete as well.

      Sadly, it will take another Turing to truly give us the tools for a truly definitive answer to your question.

    5. Re:Was it complete? by davester666 · · Score: 1

      Good thing we have a Turing Test then, so we'll know when we've found another one.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  2. Alternate headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Recent Hollywood movie inflates auction price of notebook

    1. Re:Alternate headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I hate that movie. I haven't seen it, but the advertising has put me off. The man is so important, but not once during any of the ads I saw for it, did they mention his name. They referenced some of what he did, but they did not say his name.

      They don't care about the man. They only care that the story is important enough to sell.

      The only good thing to come of it, is maybe some kid out there may think that just maybe, that there is something in math that is cool enough to play around with, because of that movie.

    2. Re:Alternate headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I hate that movie. I haven't seen it, but the advertising has put me off. The man is so important, but not once during any of the ads I saw for it, did they mention his name. They referenced some of what he did, but they did not say his name.

      They don't care about the man. They only care that the story is important enough to sell.

      The only good thing to come of it, is maybe some kid out there may think that just maybe, that there is something in math that is cool enough to play around with, because of that movie.

      Well if the man hadn't done what he did, YOU wouldn't care about him or his name either.

      If you don't already know his name, seeing it in a movie ad would be useless. The movie got Turing's story told to millions who'd never heard of him.

      Quit being a hypocritical cranky stupid jackass bitching about things that apply just as much to you.

  3. Powers...One MILLION dollars. by turkeydance · · Score: 1

    million here/million there...after a while, we're talking about REAL money.

    1. Re:Powers...One MILLION dollars. by MrBigInThePants · · Score: 1

      There is no such thing as "real" money there never was.

    2. Re:Powers...One MILLION dollars. by bobbied · · Score: 1

      There is no such thing as "real" money there never was.

      Not even BitCoin is real? Oh man, it's not even a currency! (sob)

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    3. Re:Powers...One MILLION dollars. by MrBigInThePants · · Score: 2

      All currencies are virtual. Their value is not real but implied. Even gold.

      Gold was valuable because lots of people said it was - just like money.

    4. Re:Powers...One MILLION dollars. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But there are things with absolute value: food when people are hungry. Certain minerals when people need to build things with them (including, oddly, gold to build electronics). Water in a drought.

      But yeah: money is a peculiar abstraction.

    5. Re:Powers...One MILLION dollars. by MrBigInThePants · · Score: 1

      I agree. But that does not hold for money.

      Gold is useful, as is the copper in pennies.

      No one is going to suggest the relationship between their worth and value has anything to do with utility.

  4. Wrong Bid by heretic108 · · Score: 1

    Should have sold for $1.048576 million

    --
    -- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
  5. GaY PeOpLe RULE TeH W0rLd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    m0d uP if you are no anti-gay ANUShole

  6. Still under copyright by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Different Headline: "Seventy year old manuscript written by mathematician who died 60 years ago is still under copyright in many countries."

    1. Re:Still under copyright by westlake · · Score: 1

      Different Headline: "Seventy year old manuscript written by mathematician who died 60 years ago is still under copyright in many countries."

      The owner of the manuscript is under no obligation to publish it. No obligation to display it.

      The expiration of copyright does nothing to guarantee access to primary sources, does nothing to guarantee funding for the preservation of primary sources.

    2. Re:Still under copyright by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      Mein Kampf goes out of copyright in 16 days, I believe.

    3. Re:Still under copyright by SharpFang · · Score: 1

      Moreover, copyright timer starts ticking from the first publication date!

      If you discover an unknown script by DaVinci that was hidden in a wall and never shown to the public, it will be copyrighted starting the moment it's published first!

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      45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
  7. Museums? by Sarius64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I find it sad that this history for the world might be buried in some collector's safe instead of in a museum where our world society should be able to appreciate its significance.

    1. Re:Museums? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hear hear!

    2. Re:Museums? by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 1

      I find it sad that this history for the world might be buried in some collector's safe instead of in a museum where our world society should be able to appreciate its significance.

      For stuff like manuscripts, museums are pretty much obsolete. What matters is what's on the paper, not the paper itself, so a hi-res picture is just as good, and a plain-text searchable copy is even better.

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    3. Re:Museums? by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      For stuff like manuscripts, museums are pretty much obsolete. What matters is what's on the paper, not the paper itself, so a hi-res picture is just as good, and a plain-text searchable copy is even better.

      Except in a museum, there's a good chance it's available for public viewing. In a private collector's hands, unless they're philanthropic, it'll likely be locked away in a drawer never to see the light of day again. And the public will never get a chance to see it either.

      Oh yeah, no collector will want to damage the value of their acquisition by making it easy to copy, either.

    4. Re:Museums? by alccode · · Score: 1

      I was just writing a similar comment but decided against it due to the digitization issue. However, the same concern applies to non-manuscript objects like the fully-functional Enigma machine that was also sold in the auction. Such a device would be better served in a museum or at least a publicly accessible place where people can be inspired by it - both by the technical achievements required to produce it, as well as the efforts that went into taking down the regime that employed it. Locking away the heritage of humanity's progress into private, rich hands that will probably not even be able to understand these artifacts, and thus only serve to bolster their already tremendous egos and boast to their rich friends over cocktail dinners, is not doing the inventors nor the public any service.

    5. Re:Museums? by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 1

      No, it won't - not in a museum behind a glass case. So, worst-case scenario is "same diff." And if copyright has expired, there's no problem with anyone who has a copy of the text to post it.

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    6. Re:Museums? by Sarius64 · · Score: 1

      How does one get access to a private manuscript someone just paid a million dollars for so as to copy it and deflate its collectible value? Hope for philanthropic owners seems a stretch. But I do agree with somehow get a digitization for the world's history.

    7. Re:Museums? by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 1
      I guess you didn't read the article. There's a picture from one of the pages of the manuscript, and the handwriting is terrible. Or this:

      Turing left all his papers, including the notebook, to his friend and fellow mathematician Robin Gandy. Gandy turned Turing’s dream journals over to a psychiatrist, who burned them, and gave Turing’s scientific papers to Kings College. Gandy however kept this one notebook because in the middle of it, in some blank pages, he wrote his own private journal.

      Gandy died in 1995, and the current owner of the manuscript was not disclosed by the auction house.

      You can be sure that in the 20 years preceding putting it up for auction, it was either photographed or photocopied, or more likely, both.

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    8. Re:Museums? by Sarius64 · · Score: 1

      How could reading the article change reality? If the private owner doesn't digitize it your assumption is still an assumption without evidence.

    9. Re:Museums? by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 1

      How could reading the article change reality? If the private owner doesn't digitize it your assumption is still an assumption without evidence.

      The reality is that the books pages are already photographed, which you would have seen if you had RTFA, but that's okay, keep arguing for no purpose. Museums are fast becoming mausoleums anyway.

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    10. Re:Museums? by Sarius64 · · Score: 1
      Do you even read what you write?

      You can be sure that in the 20 years preceding putting it up for auction, it was either photographed or photocopied, or more likely, both.

      How does that convey that it occurred? RTFA or not, you're just being an ass for effect. I read the article again and it doesn't reflect what you wish. There's one photo of one page with no intention for more to be digitized. Maybe you can take the Zantac before making things up in the next post.

    11. Re:Museums? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Except in a museum, there's a good chance it's available for public viewing

      No there isn't. If the filthy public were allowed to view manuscripts they would be destroyed within a few hundred years - if not by mechanisms used to display them to the public (even 56 pages is a LOT of area to cover without letting people touch it physically or have access to some kind of turning mechanism) then when the host country inevitably falls and Muslim extremists burn it as heretical or because Turing liked to stick things up his butt. Private collections are so safe you and the rest of the public don't even know most of them exist.

    12. Re:Museums? by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 1

      So, you're assuming that the people who held this for 20 years were complete dummies who went to the trouble of setting up to take pictures and only took a picture of one page. Hardly realistic or reasonable, if only so that they could have it authenticated without having to ship the original out.

      To put it into a nerd context, if you had an Action Comics #1 or Superman #1 and someone wanted to see if it was intact, you wouldn't sent it to them or any other grading service - you'd send them pictures of the actual pages so that they could ascertain that they're all there and in good shape.

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  8. Remember his name [Re:Alternate headline] by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 2

    I hate that movie. I haven't seen it, but the advertising has put me off. The man is so important, but not once during any of the ads I saw for it, did they mention his name.

    There are many possible reasons to not like the movie, but this isn't one of them. The movie itself doesn't in any way hide his name.

    This, for example http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/n... or this http://www.slate.com/blogs/bro...
    might be reasonable excuses to not want to see the movie.

    --
    http://www.geoffreylandis.com
    1. Re:Remember his name [Re:Alternate headline] by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 1

      reasonable excuses to not want to see the movie.

      Rather than watching the new movie, you could also watch another film based on a play based on the book, which doesn't shy away from some extended soliloquies about math and creativity and stars David Jacobi in a truly amazing performance. Definitely worth it, and likely a much better portrayal of Turing.

    2. Re:Remember his name [Re:Alternate headline] by amalcolm · · Score: 1

      Derek Jacobi, just for the record. I think this was a BBC drama about 20 years ago? I agree it was very good

      --
      Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
  9. Tax dodge? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is that payment a tax dodge? I doubt anyone would pay that much, otherwise.

    1. Re:Tax dodge? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Gates paid $30.8 million for Da Vincis notebook in 1994.

  10. Will this be available for us to read? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    An undisclosed buyer took this for $1M+$epsilon. Will it become available for the general public to read?

    I bought and read "Alan Turing: The Enigma" after seeing “The Imitation Game” film. A fine movie if considered in isolation, with awards, but it is very loosely based on Turing’s life and career. 2012 was the centenary of Turing’s birth, and all of computer science made a big deal of it, so I could spot lots of fiction, omissions, reversals, distortions, etc. This review captures what I did not like about the film:
    http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/dec/19/poor-imitation-alan-turing/
    See the film, then read that review, spoilers are in there.

    This 1983 volume is certainly definitive. It seldom gains altitude, but goes for 664 main pages to cover almost all known aspects of Turing’s life in great detail. Among the obstacles to the non-determined reader:
    * Some undergraduate mathematics topics, e.g., group theory, are badly introduced and then nothing follows to explain why they were so important to the Bletchly Park efforts, etc.
    * Chapters are exceptionally long, each with no internal structure, so it’s easy to get lost in what is being presented. Really, just chronological plowing ahead with arbitrary divisions.
    * Too much print is taken up with academic controversies and turf battles over who was to be in control. Or maybe that’s just my distaste from past experience.
    * There is quite a lot of discussion about “philosophy of mind" that may be of more interest to a different reader.
    I was a determined reader, but there were discouraging moments.

  11. Display but protect the manuscript's contents by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I hope the person who bought the manuscript will scan the manuscript, and put the scanned pages on a web site for everyone to read.

    I'd hate to have someone access that web site, and then put some sort of restrictive patent on the contents. Is a way to protect the contents from being restrictively patented by a reader of the web site - a "creative commons" license, or something like that?

  12. Actual breakthrough for Enigma? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Anyone have a reference that describes what actually was the breakthrough in solving the Enigma-crack?

    The movie sets it all up as if much of the key skills were on the order of hand-decyphering: word frequency, letter frequency, etc., skills that correlate well with crossword puzzles.

    But my reading of modern crypto is much more mathematical, "Oh this step of computation, by Lemma 65424, spans a subset of teh destination field..." and the 2^1024 search space loses 2^9 or 2^37 steps.

    Back to the movie, the machine seems strongly portrayed as a brute-forcer. Yet the addition of known-plaintext at both start and end is a huge breakthrough...enabling the cracking on a consistent basis. This strongly implies some mathematical reduction in the count of trajectories through substitution-space that the machine needs to brute-force search.

    Yes, I understand that the movie can't possibly cover the real topics....but:

    Does anyone have a reference that does address the technical issues and solution for the Enigma crack they achieved?

    Eric

    1. Re:Actual breakthrough for Enigma? by rkww · · Score: 1

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...