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Hi, y’all.
I think it’s important for Firedoglake to briefly observe last Saturday’s milestone: the 100th birthday of Alan Turing, one of the great pioneers of computing. Turing was born on June 23, 1912 and died on June 7, 1954. He developed key concepts in computer science like the algorithm, around which our high-tech lives are built today.
The timing is appropriate, with Pride events in many cities this past weekend, to reflect not just on Turing’s contributions to computer science but his treatment as a gay man. When he reported a robbery by a man with whom he’d had a sexual relationship, the British Government convicted him of gross indecency and forced him to take a series of injections as a form of chemical castration. FDL’s Teddy Partridge wroting movingly in 2009 of the successful campaign to obtain a governmental apology for Turing’s treatment.
Until recently, most accepted the coroner’s ruling that Turing, who died of cyanide poisoning, committed suicide. A BBC News article published Saturday creates some doubt. Professor Jack Copeland, a Turing expert, believes that his death may have been accidental rather then deliberate, the result of careless experimentation with electroplating using potassium cyanide.
The problem, he complains, is that the investigation was conducted so poorly that even murder cannot be ruled out. An “open verdict,” recognising this degree of ignorance, would be his preferred position.
None of this excuses the treatment of Turing during his final years, says Prof Copeland.
“Turing was hounded,” he told the BBC, adding: “Yet he remained cheerful and humorous.”
One final note: I’ve recently revived the @MyFDL Twitter account.I tweet a selection of diaries from MyFDL, mostly those I promote to the front page along with a few other highlights subject to my discretion. Since I edit on weekdays, that’s when you’ll find it active. This is an experiment, but if you are on Twitter & want to get updates from MyFDL then please follow.
This is tonight’s open thread. What’s on your mind?
9 Comments
Ahh, Turing.
I first encountered Turing at the Fiumicino/DaVinci airport in Rome in ’82, by buying the paperback version of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Since then I’ve often wondered if he came up with the famous “Turing Test” by virtue of his sense of alienation, e.g. “can you tell if I’m human or not, if there’s a fair screen between us?” considering his gayness.
Aside from that, I’ve been amazed at advances in heuristic programming since that time, some of which is predicted in Gödel, Escher, Bach; naturally, SIRI and Google voice search come to mind.
WWTS? (What Would Turing Say?) Who knows? But surely the advancements, much less acknowledgment of Turing’s work, would be quite welcome by his spirit if you ask me.
MyFDL is on twitter now- Yay!
Siun @Siun
Don’t forget to follow https://twitter.com/#!/myfdl for MyFDL updates!
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Google created a neural network of 16,000 processors and they can haz cats.
Oops, I missed that in your post. Sorry. Too cool, good on you!
@MyFDL is going to run 5 days a week for now. Glad you are all so excited about it :)
This is really some of the wildest news I”ve read all week and so on topic. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I don’t recall where I first learned about Turing, but I especially loved his appearance in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.
When Turing did his most famous work (1936), data processing was done with giant rooms full of diverse specialized machines that were fed boxes of punched cards, which were pushed around from machine to machine. There were sorting machines, collating machines, accounting machines for doing the arithmetic, etc. A different machine for each task.
Turing’s big contribution (Turing’s thesis) was the realization that one machine could do everything in terms of data processing and that it’s possible to build such a machine. His conceptual machine was ridiculously inefficient, but it made the point.
Subsequently, per the Wikipedia:
It’s not clear whether Mauchly was aware of Turning’s work, but John von Neumann, a celebrated mathematical and calculational prodigy of that time, certainly was. And, that 1948 redesign, which was von Neumann’s contribution, was based on the key idea from Turing’s proof of the existence of a universal computing machine — per the Wikipedia:
Thanks for filling in a bit more history.