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Lost Turing Letters Give Unique Insight Into His Academic Life Prior To Death (manchester.ac.uk)
bellwould shares a report from The University of Manchester. From the report: A lost and unique collection of letters and correspondence from the late Alan Turing has been found in an old filing cabinet in a storeroom at the University of Manchester. The file's content, which potentially hasn't seen the light of day for at least 30 years, dates from early 1949 until Turing's death in June 1954. Altogether there are 148 documents, including a letter from GCHQ, a handwritten draft BBC radio program about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and offers to lecture from some of America's most famous universities, such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
... [T]he letters do give a unique glimpse into his every day working life at the time of these events. Plus, some documents also give a brief insight into some of his more forthright personal opinions. For example, his response to a conference invitation to the U.S. in April 1953 is simply, "I would not like the journey, and I detest America." The collection of papers has been sorted, catalogued and stored at the University's Library by Archivist, James Peters. The documents themselves were found by Professor Jim Miles of the School of Computer Science.
... [T]he letters do give a unique glimpse into his every day working life at the time of these events. Plus, some documents also give a brief insight into some of his more forthright personal opinions. For example, his response to a conference invitation to the U.S. in April 1953 is simply, "I would not like the journey, and I detest America." The collection of papers has been sorted, catalogued and stored at the University's Library by Archivist, James Peters. The documents themselves were found by Professor Jim Miles of the School of Computer Science.
Was there a sign on the door saying "beware of the Leopard" ?
Aren't they Found Turing Letters?
Imagine what could have been, he was the Rockstar of GC&CS until they wanted to 'fix' him. For those who are buffs of CS history, it's always a bit sad to be reminded of our science's founder, and how tragically we lost him.
I don't read AC
It does not seem to be well-known that Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) spent two academic years at Princeton University, from the summer of 1936 to the summer of 1938.
Alan Turing returned to the U.S. during WWII as a liaison between the two communities of cryptanalysts for about four months, from November 1942 to March 1943. He arrived in New York City on November 12, 1942, before heading to the headquarters of the U.S. Secret Service (now the CIA) in Washington, D.C.
Source
My experience with smart people is that they hate travel, and with stupid people is that they like travel.
My experience with people who make statements like this is that they have a very narrow (and often self-serving) definition of smart.
>It does not seem to be well-known that Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) spent two academic years at Princeton University, from the summer of 1936 to the summer of 1938.
It's pretty famous, actually. He worked with Von Neumann, though not with anything related to computers, ironically enough.
Do tell, how exactly has Europe between 'completely destroyed'? I can't wait to hear the fruits of your paranoia
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
He should have gone to San Francisco.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Correction: autistic and self-obsessed people who think they are smart don't like to travel. Intelligent people look forward to the experience. Your opinion is biased by your limited and bigoted view, which stems from the sad fact that you only deal with narrow-minded, socially-deficient elements like yourself. Dismissed.
2 hour travel to a London airport.
3 hour wait time in security, the lounge, check-in queues, etc. at a London airport.
God-knows-how-long a flight, in cramped conditions, unable to escape.
1 hour wait time to pass security the other end.
2 hour travel to your hotel.
All the same again a few days later.
Sorry, but it's got nothing to do with autism or anything else - what a horrible way to go, just to give a talk. Sod that. I wouldn't do that to start a week's holiday in Europe.
I think you miss the point that "travel" doesn't just mean "wander around a country" but the hassle of getting there in the first place, which can consume a vast portion of your free time. If you're not going to get a holiday, are going to working / giving a talk while you're there, you'd have to pay me a LOT of money to suffer that, especially so in Turing's day.
The "experience" of travel - as in "holidaying" - is entirely different to travelling for business / academia.
YOUR opinion is biased in favour of your limited, bigoted, mis-targeted, attacking view without an understanding of what's being discussed.
Turing lived in America for a while. He detested it. And he also hated the journey.
P.S. Yes, even travel for a "holiday", sorry, but I've been many, many, many places for everything from tent-camping to five-star cruise ships (e.g. the QE2). Most "travel" sucks. Especially if you are only able to go see the same tourist attractions as everyone else. There are moments, but just because you have a funny incident in Mumbai once doesn't mean that it's a life-changing and necessary experience.
Just having been to a country that someone else hasn't doesn't make you a world expert on it. Nor does it mean you're going to "discover yourself" and "learn about new cultures" or any of the other cliches that people trot out.
Travel-and-live-there, yes, possibly. Anything else is just holidaying.
That's not harsh. This might be harsh (but I don't think so):
"His high pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: 'No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.' (In the Bell Labs cafeteria, New York, 1943)".
- Alan Hodges ("Alan Turing: the Enigma of Intelligence")
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Three supporting views (I hope instructive and entertaining):
https://www.theatlantic.com/da...
http://www.independent.co.uk/v...
https://www.spectator.co.uk/20...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
No. Because they stay at home, and you never met them. Thus while people tend to be idiots everywhere (even travelers), you incorrectly assume that the people staying at home are somewhat more smart. This is survivorship bias. You don't have any sufficient data to make conclusions about people staying at home.
Are you suggesting this is the process to travel to Europe?
This is my experience, I travel 3-4 times a year to Italy.
40 mins drive to airport
10 mins at valet collection - if you shop around this is cheaper than off - airport parking.
30 mins though security.
60 minutes until flight take off -during which time I have breakfast.
90 minutes flight to Verona
10 minutes through passport control
40 mins at car hire - the worst bit - why can't this be streamlined ???? 40 minutes drive to destination
6 hours door to door
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
By that time the UK and US had everything they needed. Turing was been replaced by a new generation of smarter, trusted people who had used all the new methods and tools.
The future was getting ready for TICOM (Target Intelligence Committee) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
The race was on to find and keep German and Italian cryptanalysts with the needed Russian skills at the end of ww2.
Germany had codebooks on Turkey, Romania, Bolivia and Ecuador. Some material from Switzerland, France and the Vatican. German and Italy also had some British and American code traffic.
Enigma was the past even with later German improvements during ww2. Spying on the Soviet Union, France, the rest of the world was the new tasking. Collect it all.
Some security issues had to be allowed for at the very start of ww2, they would not be allowed after ww2.
A lot of staff hired could not be trusted near the end of ww2 and after 1945.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I suggest that while *travel* may not broaden the mind, living in another country certainly does.
I lived in Belgium and Australia as a child and find America to be culturally insular. There's a whole world out there, folks, with music and books and art...shame we don't see as much of it as we could.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
- Mark Twain
Silence is a state of mime.
If it was email (apple/gmail/yahoo) these would be lost forever unless someone had his password and cellphone for two factor authentication.
Detest is a pretty strong word. Was his issue with the American leadership, the people, or the country as a whole? Detesting a country's leader or government I can understand, but when you start throwing around words like that at that at the entire population of a country then I start to see you less as a person with strong and different opinions than I may have and more of a bitter jerk. Without context that statement makes him sound more like the latter than the former which makes me sad.
And you keep more and more of them safe and protected in buildings built just for them!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Keep in mind he wrote that about the time his chemical castration procedure was completed. That was an act by the government of robbing a person of libido and the source of joy in life. And he surely thought of it as terribly unjust since in his mind he had done no harm to anyone. It had to be hard to be excited about travel or America in such a state, or life in general since as you know he killed himself a year later.
My experience corresponds with GP; the majority of people who like to travel tend to be too limited in intelligence to even appreciate their immediate environment, yet use the whole "travel broadens the mind" to justify their trip to another continent.
In short, the majority of people are too stupid to even learn from their current environment, yet when they proclaim that travel will broaden their mind other stupid people agree with them.
My experience is both. I see stupid people like to travel. I see smart people like to travel. I see both stupid and smart people like to stay in place. Nothing is black and white or mutual exclusive.
Also, you need to define the word "smart" before you extend it to other thing else. What "smart" to me is someone who could make a right decision to any problems. The decision may not solve those problems but at least could ease the issue to somewhat much easier to be handled with later on. Furthermore, Smart != Intelligent but overlaps.
Yeah I suppose getting ones nuts chemically destroyed would make one a wee bit cranky. Point taken,
In 1942, Alan Turning was essentially forced to go to the US to by a cryptography liaison with the explicit instructions from MI6 to not tell Americans anything because they couldn't be trusted. Here are some other comments that were made by him around that time...
Turing’s own reports from Washington are filled with disdain for what he saw as America’s overreliance on technology rather than thought. “I am persuaded that one cannot very well trust these people where a matter of judgment in cryptography is concerned,” he wrote. “It astonished me to find that they make these elaborate calculations before they had really grasped the main principles. [But] I think we can make quite a lot of use of their machinery.”
American culture was alien to Turing, who was irritated by what he saw as their incessant need for irrelevant small talk. “In one of his letters home, he’s complaining about their speech and the fact they kept saying ‘ummm’, ‘errrr’, ‘but’ and all these little stutters which got on his nerves,” Moore says. “He writes ‘Just say the sentence and then stop!’”
I'm no psychiatrist, but I suspect that an experience of being forced to play an adversarial role like that could poison the well a bit (anytime, it's them against us, there's a tendency to dehumanize your counterpart).
A lot of people in that time period understood very clearly that there are much more detestable things in the world than, "He holds a self-righteous opinion" or whatever your complaint it.
You think that there is nothing in the world worse than a person saving your life and patting themselves on the back for it, somebody else might also consider the outcome, "OK what if hadn't saved you, and also wasn't patting himself on the back? Better, right?"