[HN Gopher] What Alan Turing means to us
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What Alan Turing means to us
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 52 points
Date : 2023-06-23 18:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.turing.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.turing.ac.uk)
| 1091032014 wrote:
| Some of these comments are absolutely wild. It should go without
| saying that Alan Turing made an enormous impact on
| computing...but it looks like it needs to be said.
|
| Nobody is trying to argue that Turing is the *only* important
| figure in computing. The fact that he is celebrated doesn't
| negate the impact of anybody else.
|
| Edited to add: For anyone who's doubting Turing's impact on
| computing, or anyone who thinks that it's a modern phenomenon,
| Kleene's 1971 textbook [1] makes it pretty clear that he had an
| important impact.
|
| [1]:
| https://archive.org/details/BubliothecaMathematicaStephenCol...
| hkgjjgjfjfjfjf wrote:
| [dead]
| asdf6677 wrote:
| [flagged]
| alexb_ wrote:
| Seriously? We're saying that dating a 19 year old makes you a
| pedophile now?
| daveoc64 wrote:
| Maybe looking up the definition of pedophile would help you out
| here.
|
| 19 is not pre-pubescent.
| cubefox wrote:
| There is an article by Schmidhuber about early theoretical
| computer science to which Turing made contributions:
|
| https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/turing-oversold.html
|
| He claims Turing's achievements are often oversold. Whether or
| not that is true, the historical connections to Turing's
| theoretical work are interesting.
| [deleted]
| istillwritecode wrote:
| I like how he tried to disprove the Riemann Hypothesis. That's
| actually how I first heard of Alan Turing, by seeing his paper on
| the subject. https://www-
| users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/turing.zeta.pdf
| gargalatas wrote:
| Although I believe that Claude Shannon [1] was the father of
| computers and a much more important person than Alan Turing who
| probably had a more "controversial" personality and thus he
| became a "cinematic" figure.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Both were important, as well as many others, like Kurt Godel.
|
| Science is about growing the frontier of knowledge, akin to
| making a cake larger, not dividing up a cake.
| kristianc wrote:
| Possibly - but this thread is about Turing, because of an
| article about Alan Turing, which was posted by the Alan Turing
| institute on the anniversary of the birthday of, you guessed
| it, Alan Turing.
|
| Why the need to play one up?
| gargalatas wrote:
| Because Shannon's name has to be heard as well just for some
| people who admire Steve Jobs as the biggest IT Idol in the
| universe and have no idea who the hell is Dennis Ritchie.
| Just saying..
| kristianc wrote:
| Great, write a blog post on him then and post it here for
| us all to read.
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| Neither being gay nor being forcibly castrated has anything to
| do with personality [1]. [1] Link to Wikipedia personality page
| gargalatas wrote:
| "While there is no generally agreed-upon definition of
| personality"
|
| Are you sure?
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| Yes, I am sure. Read the rest of the article. None of the
| disagreement is about sexual orientation being part of
| personality.
| gargalatas wrote:
| Well I am not, but I believe it can shape some aspects of
| it. But since I find you so dogmatic about it how about
| reading some papers which I really found very easily on
| google:
| https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/finding-new-
| home/2...
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| You claimed it was Turing's personality which made him a
| "cinematic figure". Now you are coming with irrelevant
| articles about how sexual orientation is linked to
| personal traits like openness, agreeableness and
| conscientiousness. For your argument to follow, it should
| be that one of these made him a cinematic figure, huh?
| Animats wrote:
| Until the 1980s or so, Turing wasn't known much outside
| mathematics, and was considered a minor figure in computing. Von
| Neumann was the big name in computer architecture, and Friedman
| was the big name in cryptanalysis.
|
| Marian Rejewski in Poland invented the "bombe" for breaking early
| German Enigma. Upgrades to the Enigma increased the work required
| to crack the code substantially, and Turing was later involved in
| developing a bigger model "bombe" that could be mass produced.
|
| The next upgrade on the German side, to the "Lorenz" machine
| (like the Enigma, but with more rotors) forced a move to
| electronics. Hence the "Colossus" machine, which was a key-
| tester, like a Bitcoin miner, not a general purpose computer.
|
| Colossus was designed by Tommy Flowers, who got a raw deal out of
| this. He worked for the General Post Office, which ran the UK
| phone system, and had been working on electronic switching.
| Because the Bletchly Park operation was classified long after the
| war, he was unable to get funding to build a real computer after
| the war. So he went back to phone switching. He lived until 1998,
| so he got to see electronic computing happen without being a
| major figure in it.
|
| "Filed under Equality, diversity and inclusion."
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| The last part of your statement seems angry?
|
| The story of Turing is indeed particularly interesting for the
| chemical castration and run ins with law over the big
| government interference in his personal life. If we talk just
| about people who have achieved things in computing the list is
| huge but if we discuss people who gave sp much and had
| government then take so much it's a different list isn't it?
| But I don't see that as being a bad thing.
|
| So yes Turing is a great representative of an aspect of history
| we should strive not to repeat. That's not a bad thing.
| Animats wrote:
| > The last part of your statement seems angry?
|
| That was from the original web page.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Yeah but the point is that it's ok that we consider Turing
| special from all the others who also contributed because
| the other circumstances make the whole story more
| interesting.
| ffssffss wrote:
| You changed the context pretty substantially by moving it
| to the end of the piece and putting it in scare quotes
| though. I also read it as intentionally pejorative. You
| might want to edit the post if that's not what you meant.
| pixel3234 wrote:
| [flagged]
| pixel3234 wrote:
| [flagged]
| katamarimambo wrote:
| peak Hacker News
| adrian_b wrote:
| Turing had very important contributions to the design of
| several early computers, culminating in the Ferranti Mark 1,
| the first general-purpose electronic computer available
| commercially (in 1951, ahead of UNIVAC).
|
| The most well-known contributions of Turing to the instruction
| set architecture of Ferranti Mark 1 were a pair of instructions
| that were added to other CPUs only many years later, i.e. the
| equivalent of POPCNT (added by Intel only in 2009, in Nehalem)
| and of RDRAND (added by Intel only in 2012, in Ivy Bridge).
|
| No other reasons are necessary to recognize his great merits.
| morelisp wrote:
| You seem jealous, maybe because his eponymous invention was
| useful and yours is something everyone hates.
| xyzzy3000 wrote:
| I won't say that Turing is overrated, but I will say that
| Flowers is very, very underrated.
|
| I find it astounding that Flowers wasn't even fully compensated
| for the personal expense he took to buy the bits to make
| Colossus.
|
| Bill Tutte also deserves a mention.
| Animats wrote:
| Flowers was one of the first people to push data around with
| tubes. There was also an IBM group working on that before
| WWII, and by 1943 they had the "Vacuum Tube Multiplier"
| working. That eventually became the IBM 603 in 1946.
|
| I've seen one in an IBM historical display; it looks like a
| very large hard-sided suitcase made of perforated black
| metal. The 603 was a limited product built to answer the
| question of whether electronics could be deployed to field
| locations and serviced by IBM maintainers. Only 100 were
| built. They solved the problems of making tubes work in the
| field, so the IBM 604, the production version, was built in
| 1948. This was the beginning of IBM's line of cost-effective
| electronic business machines, ending with the IBM 650, which
| was a full scale computer affordable by businesses. Knuth
| learned to program on an IBM 650.
|
| Much of early computing was about getting memory that worked,
| tubes that worked, capacitors that worked, connectors that
| worked, and making the things maintainable. All that didn't
| really come together until the IBM 1401, which was the first
| mass-produced computer that Just Worked.
|
| It wasn't an architecture problem. The general ideas there
| had been worked out in the 1930s by Eckert at Columbia
| University, who came up with some insane mods to IBM
| tabulating machines to use them for scientific purposes. This
| kludge, in 1934, was the first automatic number-crunching
| computing machine.[1] Eckert went on to become a founder of
| UNIVAC.
|
| Understand, all this was being done in an era where a
| reliable AM radio was hard.
|
| [1] http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/switch.html
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| A realpolitik lesson for the scientists of the future: next
| time you have the power, hold it, don't squander it on
| politicians, begging for crumbs, grants and the decency of a
| private life. Oppenheimer should have continued his quote
| "now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" with "bow to
| me mortals, cause it is I that controls the machine" not
| "here you go Mr. Truman, go nuts with the bombs".
|
| Also, Turing can never be overrated, beyond being the one who
| pulled us into a new metaphysics of computability (alongside
| Alonzo Church and others, sure), he will also be the one to
| bring the 22nd century into a new metaphysics of
| morphogenetic freedom [1] [2] [3]. Not sure about Flowers,
| but Turing knew there were realms of computationality way
| beyond their present tubes and levers.
|
| [1] 1952, Alan M. Turing, _The Chemical Basis of
| Morphogenesis_ , https://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/pa
| perscs191/turing...
|
| [2] "The Collective Intelligence of Cells During
| Morphogenesis with Dr. Michael Levin",
| https://youtu.be/p4Fm7jLNrpg?t=125
|
| [3] "Morphogenesis: Geometry, Physics, and Biology with Dr.
| Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan",
| https://youtu.be/b1-sEhB5h8Y?t=85
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| I learned about Turing at university in the 2000s, before his
| personal history became a vogue subject. Specifically, I
| learned about Turing machines and the halting problem,
| alongside Von Neumann machines and such.
|
| It wasn't until later that I learned about Turing's suffering
| due to his sexuality.
|
| so I am quite curious: why is Flowers underrated? What
| contributions did he make to his fields similar to Turing's?
| adrian_b wrote:
| Most of his important work has been done during the War and
| it was classified (being applied in electronic
| cryptographic machines), so he was not allowed to brag
| about it.
| kristianc wrote:
| Turing's work wasn't fully understood or appreciated until the
| the 1980s specifically because many of the documents which
| revealed the extent of his contributions were classified by the
| UK government until then, and yes because of the social
| attitudes of the time, particularly regarding his sexuality.
| Without those two things he would have got far more credit than
| he actually did.
|
| The declassification, and a thawing of social attitudes toward
| LGBT people enabled Turing to be recognized as the figure he is
| today. So yes, file it under equality, diversity and inclusion
| all you want.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Until the 1980s or so, Turing wasn't known much outside
| mathematics, and was considered a minor figure in computing.
| Von Neumann was the big name in computer architecture, and
| Friedman was the big name in cryptanalysis.
|
| Big part of that is because a lot of what he did was kept
| classified or not publicized too much by the British
| government. They seem to have done a complete 180 on this
| relatively recently (now that tech and SV are all over the
| news) and seem to want to brand anything computing related with
| his name.
|
| Am-I the only one that finds is odd how the British government
| brags about Alan Turing after what they did to him? Having a
| government research center named after him seems particularly
| strange after what they had him endure. The state forced him to
| undergo chemical castration because of his homosexuality. Same
| state kept his achievements and contribution to the war effort
| a secret up until after his death, so they could persecute a
| war hero without the public knowing about it.
|
| Crazy to think he was convicted in 1952. Same year Elizabeth
| became Queen and head of the British government. She could have
| simply overturned his conviction, as British law allowed her to
| do so. But she and the crown chose not to.
|
| The man saved women, men, children, of all races and
| orientations from an horrible end. Had he not cracked the
| enigma's cryptography, there would most likely remain nothing
| today of the crown that persecuted him. Blown to dust by the
| Luftwaffe.
|
| If only the British government had extended the same humanity
| to Turing himself.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| A lot of what Turing did was kept classified or not publicized
| too much by the British government. They seem to have done a
| complete 180 on this relatively recently (now that tech and SV
| are all over the news) and seem to want to brand anything
| computing related with his name.
|
| Am-I the only one that finds is odd how the British government
| brags about Alan Turing after what they did to him? Having a
| government research center named after him seems particularly
| strange after what they had him endure. The state forced him to
| undergo chemical castration because of his homosexuality. Same
| state kept his achievements and contribution to the war effort a
| secret up until after his death, so they could persecute a war
| hero without the public knowing about it.
|
| Crazy to think he was convicted in 1952. Same year Elizabeth
| became Queen and head of the British government. She could have
| simply overturned his conviction, as British law allowed her to
| do so. But she and the crown chose not to.
|
| The man saved women, men, children, of all races and orientations
| from an horrible end. Had he not cracked the enigma's
| cryptography, there would most likely remain nothing today of the
| crown that persecuted him. Blown to dust by the Luftwaffe.
|
| If only the British government had extended the same humanity to
| Turing himself.
| _Wintermute wrote:
| "The British Government" isn't some singular immortal person. I
| imagine the people in charge of naming this academic institute
| had nothing to do with his conviction or homosexuality laws in
| the 1950s, they most likely weren't even alive then.
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