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Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary

nytimes.com

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Re: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary

#21

Post by PhasmaFelis »

Animats wrote: post #7

Turing was a minor figure in computing history until it became known that he was gay. Since then, he's hyped a lot more. Turing didn't design Colossus; Tommy Flowers did. Turing didn't design the first bombe, Marian Rejewski did. Turing figured out a way to make it 26x faster at the cost of 26x as many wires and contacts. Neither of those were general purpose computers; they were key-testers, like a Bitcoin miner. Th…

This is completely not true. I learned about Turing machines in the '80s, and that was as a kid reading basic programming books from the library. The Turing test has been commonplace in sci-fi for at least that long. The Turing Award has been around since the '60s.

What really gets me is that--as jgrahamc pointed out--you said this same thing two years ago, and were corrected in the same way. Which means you knew this was wrong, and you posted it anyway.

I can't comprehend being so troubled by the existence of historical gay people that you're willing to deliberately lie to discredit them.

Re: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary

#23

Post by danso »

Animats wrote: post #7

Turing was a minor figure in computing history until it became known that he was gay. Since then, he's hyped a lot more. Turing didn't design Colossus; Tommy Flowers did. Turing didn't design the first bombe, Marian Rejewski did. Turing figured out a way to make it 26x faster at the cost of 26x as many wires and contacts. Neither of those were general purpose computers; they were key-testers, like a Bitcoin miner. Th…

I think calling Turing's achievements "minor" (versus, say, "overrated") is up for debate. But saying that "it became known that he was gay" underplays and distorts even just that part of his life, as if he were just a mediocrity until he played the game of sexual politics and became a media darling. He was convicted and chemically castrated by his own government and had his career (and travel) curtailed at the age of 40. Even with the high recognition that his name gets today, we should still wonder how much more he would have achieved and been recognized had he not become ostracized at the prime of his career.

Re: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary

#24

Post by jimmyjim123 »

" As one of the most influential code breakers of World War II, his cryptology yielded intelligence believed to have hastened the Allied victory." -- Nope, not quite true.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/15/polish-codebr...

"They even taught Turing how to build electro-mechanical devices which simulated the workings of the Enigma machine and enabled operators to cycle through one possible setting after another."

He built a machine to speed up the solution.

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