Alan Turing, the Inventor of Software 371
Roland Piquepaille writes "BusinessWeek celebrates its anniversary with a series of articles about the great thinkers and innovators from the past 75 years. The series stars with a profile of Alan Turing, "Thinking Up Computers." In case you forgot, Turing is the man who created the concept of a "universal machine" which would perform various and diverse actions when given various sets of instructions. In other words, he laid out in the 1920s the foundations of software. You'll find the introduction of Turing's profile, plus more details, photographs and references in this overview."
Turing was also... (Score:3, Insightful)
So, any time someone says gays are just a bunch of promiscuous, stupid sinners, ask them if they've ever heard of Alan Turing...
Re:Ah, but is it a real article... (Score:5, Insightful)
Aristoteles (Score:2, Insightful)
Paging Charles Babbage (Score:1, Insightful)
What, your history books don't go past the 1900's?
Ada Lovelace (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember Lady Ada (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Turing was also... (Score:5, Insightful)
I can just imagine all the articles. Joe Schmoe, a straight white man with brown hair, accomplished much in his life blah blah.
Oh noooo, it's a conspiracy against the gay! Let's all point the prejudice finger.
-Jesse
Re:Killing people the only way to "Innovate"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Name one war that was not fought for economic reasons. Even the so-called Crusades, nominally fought for religion, were an excuse to keep increasinly powerful nobility in check by making them incur such a large expense as trying to invade the middle east. Every war I can think of has economic motives despite frequent facades of other purposes. Not that there's anything wrong with that; large scale human social activity comes down to economics.
Re:Turing was also... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Turing was also... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why waste ink on this almost useless fact (other than it perhaps leading to the circumstances of his death) when there's a lot more worth saying about the guy.
I just hope that if I ever doing something amazing that after my death we don't get to read:
"John Graham-Cumming invented the Banana Wumpus Driver. At age 13 he realized that he was attracted to women and spent his entire life in pursuit of sexual encounters with various women until he finally married..."
John.
Re:Turing was also... (Score:1, Insightful)
Ignoring something that is irrelevant is not the same as being insensitive to a topic.
[OT] Re:Turing didn't do crap. (Score:2, Insightful)
If you add in self-preservation as a requirement (Asimov) perhaps it would be a better test.
Re:Turing was gay and mistreated by society (Score:4, Insightful)
-Jesse, in a ranting mood.
Re:[OT] Re:Turing didn't do crap. (Score:2, Insightful)
The turing test only works in terms of 'weak' AI - that is that actions determine intelligence, and internal state doesn't matter.
Strong AI on the other hand, says that to be intelligent, you must not only act intelligent, but also be intelligent internally.
On the other hand, the self-preservation requirement doesn't really strike me as a facet of intelligence. A suicidal person might still have the intelligence to write a thoughtful note...
Re:[OT] Re:Turing didn't do crap. (Score:3, Insightful)
It requires human perception, which is fallible and inconsistent, to validate the quality of AI.
Worse, it requires the AI to fake human fallible and inconsistent human perception. Any test that requires an AI to wait for a bit before giving the answer to a hard numerical problem is a daft test.
The Turing test tests humanness, not intelligence. There is no reason for (artificial) intelligence to be similar to a human's at all.
Re:Turing was also... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why waste ink on this almost useless fact (other than it perhaps leading to the circumstances of his death) when there's a lot more worth saying about the guy.
Perhaps because Turing was driven to suicide by an establishment which hounded and bullied him for being gay? By no stretch of the imagination is that a useless fact.
Re:Turing was also... (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends. Was he persecuted for being straight? Did he lose his security clearance, get forced to take massive doses of hormones, and be driven to suicide in spite of his contribution to the WWII war effort?
Any story that would try to talk about Turing but not even mention such details that were so critically important to his life wouldn't be complete.
Re:good riddance (Score:1, Insightful)
It's arguable that Turing won the war by decoding the enigma. If it wasn't for him, the Nazis would've probably won - and you'd presumably feel right at home. Twat.
Re:the Test of time (Score:4, Insightful)
The idea of identifying gender, rather than human or not human, is actually much more subtle than might be at first realised. He of course meant this to be extended as we all nowadays quote the test, but the original idea is subtly elegant... He was tackling the problem from the other direction: forget a computer pretending to be "intelligent", but what do we mean by "thinking" - If a man can "pretend" to be a woman, as per his test, what does that prove? That he is a woman?! Of course not... Thus was does it mean to be a woman, etc etc - Turing was a genius with amazing insight and perception.
What a loss.
John von Neumann (Score:3, Insightful)
It's usually John von Neumann who is given credit for inventing the modern concept of the "stored program" in the mid 40's. So if I had to pick a single person to label the inventor of software, I think I would probably choose him. Turing could perhaps be labelled a father of computing.
But then again, those are all just subjective labels.
Alan Turing [google.com]
John von Neumann [google.com]
I don't mean to be picky, but I have my Automata Theory final in 5 hours
Good luck.
Re:Alan Turing: The Movie. (Score:4, Insightful)
This guy should be the hero of gay rights. (Score:5, Insightful)
Children in school would learn about how the man who cracked Enigma and might have literally saved WW2 was eventually driven to commit suicide....
While no gay person I know has even heard of Turing. I never heard about him until college.
I think its another case of people not giving a damn about geeks...
Re:Turing was also... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because its a big freaking deal. Its not like he was a mathmatician who happened to also be gay on the side. After helping immensely in WW2, and inventing programming, he was forced to admit he was homosexual.
He was imprisoned as a security risk, and forced to either spend the rest of his life in jail or take hormone injections. He chose the hormone injections. His career was over, and he wasn't allowed to continue to work on the thing he is now famous for. Its strongly suspected that the forced government injections helped drive him to suicide a few years later.
FORCED GOVERNMENT INJECTIONS to try to stop him from being gay, and therefore easily susceptible to communists.
I know many people are jaded by political correctness and media hype, but in this case, it is a BIG GODDAMN ISSUE that this guy was gay.
Ya, because reasoning with bigots works (Score:3, Insightful)
Who cares? Aside from the fact that Turing's sexuality is not ignored, it would be a good thing if it was. Let me guess: if it was something that the mainstream media obsessed about, you'd post comments about how homophobia in mainstream media glosses over Turing's accomplishments in favor of irrelevant discussion of his sexual preferences.
Go read Cryptonomicon [amazon.com] if you need to obsess about what everybody's sexuality is.
Re:Turing was also... (Score:3, Insightful)
> his contributions to computer science.
It's only relevant because he was a _persecuted_ gay. Now we know that perpetrators of this particular type of discrimination can be enemies of science. There are always a set of poltically correct ways to discriminate (e.g. awards, reputation, curriculum vitae) and politically incorrect ways to discriminate (gender, age, race, etc). Sexual orientation used to be an unquestionably acceptable criterion for discrimination, and Turing's example shows why that's changing.
> But to have to label him right off the bat everytime his name is uttered is
> absurd.
That's like saying that we shouldn't say Jackie Robinson was black when talking about his accomplishments. His race is central to the the story of what baseball gained by his entry in to game. Turing's sexuality is central to the story of what computer science lost due to Turing's expulsion from the field.
A reason to mention his affectional orientation... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Suicide not a certainty (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, come on. How does a computer scientist (for lack of a term broad enough to cover Turing) accidentally eat an apple laced with KCN? AFAIK cyanide isn't a common fixture of most computer/math research labs, and Turing as a (dabbling but competent) chemist would certainly have the common sense to not let a cyanide spill go uncleaned.
I mean, think about it. What would you do if your government arrested you and said, "Hey bub, you read too much porn and we think porn-reading is a mental illness, so we're putting you on estrogen to kill your sex drive. For life, probably, since nobody can really cure porn-reading. Oh, and you'll grow boobies. If you don't like it, you can take prison instead, where people will ass-rape you daily for being a porn-reading sicko. Have a nice day!"? (On the odd chance that you're a woman, instead imagine some mythical hormone that withers up your breasts, kills your libido, and turns you into a tomboy.) I'm not sure that I know any people, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, that wouldn't be demeaned and degraded by such a radical forced change to their identity.
He'd turn in his grave (Score:3, Insightful)
He would have been delighted with a 1GHz / 1GB RAM machine and now it is just taken for granted.
Re:Turing was also... (Score:3, Insightful)
Turing would be every bit as important historically if he were not gay.
If you're talking about Turing as a victim of discrimination, obviously his sexual orientation is relevant. But most of the time when people are talking about Turing (this article for example) they are talking about his intelectual accomplishments, and his being gay is irrelevant.
Sigh. If there is a lesson to take from the example of Turing, it ought to be that being gay should not have been considered a particularly important thing about him at the time.
Re:This guy should be the hero of gay rights. (Score:3, Insightful)
Being gay and famous isn't heroic.
Re:Turing was also... (Score:3, Insightful)
> black.
I disagree. Jackie Robinson would not be remotely as important historically if he had not changed American baseball. His being black was not his contribution. It is, however, relevant to the story of his contribution.
> Turing would be every bit as important historically if he were not gay.
Turing almost certainly would have been MORE important historically had he not been a victim of discrimination. He was young and barely in his prime when he was essentially expelled from the scientific community.
Both examples show great impact on a profession, and unfair discrimination against particular individual characteristics are relevant to each story. Certainly I agree that Turing being gay didn't cause his potential, but I strongly urge people to consider that his being gay, and the discrimination elicited thereby, is very relevant to the story of what would have been contributed by this man were he not gay.
Don't Forget Tommy Flowers (Score:2, Insightful)
Tommy died quite recently in comparative obscurity. After the war he tried to encourage the Post Office (whom he worked for) to develop a digitally controlled automatic telephone exchange. The Post Office (now BT) didn't understand what he was suggesting, so digital telephone exchanges were not developed until the late 1970's, some 30 years later.
It takes a genius to come up with an idea, but it takes another genius from an engineering background to turn them into something that will work.
Re:Turing was also... (Score:2, Insightful)
Mathematicians are fond of saying "in principle, there is no difference" when the differences are only a matter of detail, and do not affect the abstraction. Essentially, the input (and output) of a Turing machine is a sequence of symbols. The input (and output) of a modern computer is a sequence of symbols. The nature of one (concrete) symbol is somewhat different, of course, but the fact that it is just a symbol is the same.
The input to a TM is a sequence of abstract symbols. The input to a modern computer is a sequence of concrete symbols. We have 'mickeys', which are symbols that each represent a mouse-movement. We have 'clicks', which are symbols that each represent a mouse-click. We have 'characters', which are symbols that represent key strokes. And, we have 'ticks', which are symbols that represent the passage of time. But, in abstract principle, every one of these is just a symbol.
On the output side, a TM produces a tape containing a sequence of abstract symbols. A modern computer produces a time-sequence of screen images. Each screen image may have quite a lot of information, but the aggregate of all of the pixels can still, in principle, be considered as one symbol.