11–20 of 95 posts
> But all this came to an end on June 7, 1954, when Turing suddenly died. (My own guess is that it was not suicide, but that’s a different story.) Interesting tidbit there.
If you're in London and in any way interested in computing history, you owe it to yourself to visit Bletchley Park. It's a fantastic day visit from London. (About an hour away or so via the railway, as I remember it.) There's a direct train from Paddington, iirc. UK people please fill in.
Go on a weekday morning and you’ll be there in 40m.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you state in a few lines what you think he should get more credit for? He's an interesting guy, a good businessman, and I enjoy reading his anecdotes, but I kinda figure he gets about the right amount of credit for his achievements. If you mean "new kind of science" for example -I think he got about what he deserved on that.
You shouldn't judge the value of conjectures until you know whether they're true or not. Right now, we have no computable model for physics. NKS conjectures that some particular types of CA could compute our universe. If this turns out to be true, it'll be huge.
Putting that aside; computer guys seem to think "computability" is important in physics. I don't. The strong Church Turing thesis is an ideological idea, not a physical one. In fact, it is an ideological idea with very little evidence in its favor either in computer science or in the world of matter.
When I was studying quantum mechanics, I quite often went to this book for a very different perspective on a lot of the details. I found it to be exceptionally well written and had a seemingly different approach from the typical college or graduate level quantum mechanics textbook. We had a copy in one of our department libraries, if you can get your hands on one, I recommend giving it a read when you want a new pers…
Indeed. Not only can one get a glance of a unique perspective of one of the founding fathers, but also a lot of important facts not covered in many other textbooks. One of such facts are the low heat capacities of atoms that do not fit any classical theory. This fact alone is able to kill most of the "alternative" interpretations of quantum mechanics that the popular media sell-off as "science" nowadays.
> But all this came to an end on June 7, 1954, when Turing suddenly died. (My own guess is that it was not suicide, but that’s a different story.) Interesting tidbit there.
it's an openly debated topic, ranging from a simple accident to bullying by the state and other conspiracy theories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Death
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You shouldn't judge the value of conjectures until you know whether they're true or not. Right now, we have no computable model for physics. NKS conjectures that some particular types of CA could compute our universe. If this turns out to be true, it'll be huge.
I dunno, I think it's pretty easy to judge the value of not easily testable wacky conjectures. I don't think much of Penrose's idea that brains are quantum gravitic computers either, and that is vastly more close to being testable, and Penrose's achievements and track record in actual science are also vastly more impressive. Putting that aside; computer guys seem to think "computability" is important in physics. I do…
Computable physics would be extremely useful. Even with coarse approximations you can only integrate the Schrödinger equation among hundreds of particles. So you can't do accurate computational biochemistry except maybe one small molecule at a time.
If you're in London and in any way interested in computing history, you owe it to yourself to visit Bletchley Park. It's a fantastic day visit from London. (About an hour away or so via the railway, as I remember it.) There's a direct train from Paddington, iirc. UK people please fill in.
If you're in London and in any way interested in computing history, you owe it to yourself to visit Bletchley Park. It's a fantastic day visit from London. (About an hour away or so via the railway, as I remember it.) There's a direct train from Paddington, iirc. UK people please fill in.
> “The writing style is entirely different. Personality-wise, the writer of sample B has a quicker, more intuitive thinking style than the one of sample A.”
How can anybody of Wolfram's intelligence unquestioningly accept this nonsense?
If you're in London and in any way interested in computing history, you owe it to yourself to visit Bletchley Park. It's a fantastic day visit from London. (About an hour away or so via the railway, as I remember it.) There's a direct train from Paddington, iirc. UK people please fill in.
What will you find at Bletchley Park?
An on-site museum of the WW2 Enigma code breaking activities, where they happened. This is where Alan Turing worked. Live demonstrations of the 1940s eras computer "bombes".
But, perhaps, most of all:
A chance to visit a historic site.. the activities there could very well have decided the outcome of WW2.
There's also a neat live retrocomputing display of early home computers. And it also happens to be a very lovely area to hang around in - nice buildings, park areas, ponds etc.