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."
True? (Score:2, Interesting)
Has anyone else heard the rumur that apple computers logo is a tribute to Turing? Rainbow colored apple with a bite taken out of it and all? I wish I could remember where I heard that.
Inventor of software? (Score:2, Interesting)
Turing a genius? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:True? (Score:1, Interesting)
All apples contain cyanide (in the seeds)
http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/apples.asp
A small point omitted in the article (Score:5, Interesting)
Turing was an amateur chemist in addition to being a world-class mathematician. His choice of suicide method was intended to lessen the impact it would have on other members of his family, in particular his mother. By eating a cyanide laced apple, it has been speculated that he wanted to make his death look like an accident. His mother would think that he had been performing some chemistry experiment, and then forgot to thoroughly wash his hands before eating the apple. Having one's son die is bad enough, but for it to be a suicide is doubly worse.
On the more dramatic side, if one were so inclined, it could be said that his method of suicide was rather symbolic. Turing had partook in what was in his day forbidden. For this, he had been "cast out" of his chosen profession and what he loved to do -- in some sense, his Eden. As a final gesture before leaving this world, he ate a piece of forbidden fruit that was symbolic of this fact.
It's a tragedy that the ignorance and intolerance of first half of the 20th century could have driven such a brilliant man to suicide. If it weren't for Turing, much of what we take for granted today may be a lot different or may not even exist at all. Hopefully the world has wisened over the last 50 years.
Re:story is not quite right.. (Score:5, Interesting)
the interesting thing about turing machines though is how they are maximal and nothing additional makes the turing machine more powerful (like non-determinism, multiple tapes, two way tapes, etc) because those can all be simulated with a regular turing machine using an algorithm adjustment.
Still open (Score:2, Interesting)
Turing left a bunch of still new ideas unexplored. Just look at his 48's paper Intelligent Machinery> [alanturing.net].
Recurrent connectionism was the starting point, and P machines have not even been explored.
What's in a sig?
Revisionist History (Score:3, Interesting)
IMHO, he invented the first programming language.
Details here [vt.edu]
Re:A small point omitted in the article (Score:3, Interesting)
At a wild guess I would say that the apple idea came along due to Northern Europeen painters who knew mostly apple trees.
Suicide not a certainty (Score:1, Interesting)
Andrew Hodges, whose biography of Turing is the most well read, is a fairly active gay-rights campaigner (more power to him), and it benefits his agenda to accept the death as suicide without writing perhaps slightly more about the circumstances surrounding Turing's death.
Re:Turing was also... (Score:1, Interesting)
And there you hit the nail on the head. Its a biographical article - about Turings life story - and of significant interest because of how his homosexuality affected his life. It may make no real difference to many other gay people being reviewed in the magazine in other places.
If it was meant to be a discussion solely of his technical contributions, why then it wouldn't even need to mention the war, but would probably be out of PHB comprehension land, and so not in Business Week.
It pisses me off that candidates for the UKs greatest wordsmith (Oscar Wilde) and scientist of the last century ended up dying (indirectly) due to the authorities prejudices.
Re:This guy should be the hero of gay rights. (Score:5, Interesting)
Remarkable:Turing was also... (Score:1, Interesting)
The Enigma had more combinations than there are molecules in the visible universe...if the History Channel told me right. More than "4*10^26" if "Enigma+combinations" is Googled.
No small feat.
online Enigma (Score:3, Interesting)
Play with that a while, and you'll see why that was such a bitch to crack.
Re:A small point omitted in the article (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What Turing Worked For and Against (Score:1, Interesting)
It would be nice if you could provide a reference disussing your "Arab from the middle ages who formulated the idea of a 'list of stepwise instructions with iteration, condition, and branched control flow' (as a way of describing complex building plans)". I don't think that al-Khwarizmi was responsible for this, of course I could be wrong... maybe you are thinking of al-Khashni, or someone else.
Re:What Turing Worked For and Against (Score:3, Interesting)
Um, actually, then and there it was. Keep in mind that Britain was still desperately broke while the U.S. was rolling in cash. Meanwhile Parliment was in the hands of Big Government socialists.
For this and other reasons, doing leading edge computer work in Britain meant working closely under the same sorts of government dimwits who were making him miserable in the first place.
Meanwhile, in the good old U.S.A., much computer development was in the hands of private companies like IBM which, I remind you, kept a vigorous division operating in Nazi Germany until right before the Allies arrived.
I'm not making a moral statement one way or the other (at least not in this here post) but the consequence was that there were jobs in the U.S. available to Turing that would have been backed by the simple desire to have his skills available to increase their bank accounts.
Would he have been square in the sights of McCarthy and his self-hating gay scumbags within a few short years? Maybe. But we'll never know. But we do know that "the Americans" were far from uniform in their attitudes and plenty of them, including plenty with cash and other brilliant computer guys already there, would have welcomed Turing with open arms.
Rustin