Google Quadruples A.M. Turing Award To $1M 42
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.
Lamport (Score:5, Informative)
It's Leslie Lamport, not Leslie Lambert. If you didn't know that, then you're not a true LaTeX user.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm just glad that ONE award in computing (and not even one that pays well) finally went to a woman!
Re:Lamport (Score:4, Informative)
FYI, Barbara Liskov won the Turing Award a few years ago.
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It's good that Ms. Lambert didn't get aced out of her award by men like Rosalind Franklin did.
Re: (Score:3)
That's quite a beard for a woman [wikimedia.org]
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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. [microsoft.com])
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Leslie who? (Score:2)
stood on the shoulders of Knuth, creator of Tex (Score:3)
Lamport, creator of LaTex, just rode the coattails of Donald Knuth, known as the creator of Tex. ;)
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You win.
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Knuth won in 1974 though, so fair enough.
Also, Lamport didn't win for Latex, but for his work on distributed computing.
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Re:stood on the shoulders of Knuth, creator of Tex (Score:5, Funny)
When I program in JavaScript, I feel like I'm standing on the shoulders of midgets.
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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.
New directions in well known Bell Labs program (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.
WTF? (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
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AM turing award (Score:3)
I don't want to get up early in the morning - is there a PM turing award?
Wouldn't it be quintuple? (Score:1)
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.
Fuck!! Not being able to edit is killing me!!! (Score:1)
Disregard my entire drunken comment!!!
Doh!!
Re: (Score:2)
Should I... (Score:1)
Should I turn in my solution now, or wait for just one more increase in prize money? Hmmm....
Official Announcement (Score:5, Informative)
The linked article is poorly informed, not to mention full of typos.
Here is the official announcement [acm.org], straight from the ACM.
6-min video to understand Dr. Lamport's impact (Score:2)
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