11–20 of 311 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Canon? Isn't Turing being canonised the problem in the first place?
In a fictional universe a medium (book, movie etc.) being "canon" is the original author's seal of approval claiming "this happened". I think this is a joking extrapolation to the real life, and the "author" here is, in best case real life, or as an approximation, historians' position based on evidence.
- The core mechanisms of the machine for running the Enigma "quickly" was from the Polish - The machine wasn't even a generalized computer!
I just felt really misled! Perhaps the biggest thing is Turing probably ended up doing good amounts of contributions to the academic/theoretical side and the practical side, but it feels like we are missing opportunities to describe the confluence of so many people's ideas in this period of history to end up at the current "machines that read instructions and then act upon them in a generalized fashion, very quickly".
This article seems to be that, and it's super intersting
His cryptographic achievements during WW2 were also vastly oversold. Most of the theoretical breakthroughs needed to crack Enigma were made by Polish mathematicians, but it was more palatable for the British government to put a Brit forward, just as they did for penicillin.
There is now a memorial at Bletchley Park to the Polish mathematicians who worked on Enigma.
I feel like it's really weird to call what Gödel was doing computer science.
It's like calling astronomy "telescopy", to paraphrase Dijkstra.
There are a lot of true facts thrown in the article, but it does not explore the reason why this is. I feel the era of great thinkers who single handledly performed disruptive breakthroughs in their field, the Galileos and Newtons, was over with the Einstein-era (and even Einstein also stood in the shoulders of giants). No one works in isolation any more, and that is not a bad thing. You can subject any relevant figu…
People have had that perched-on-giants feeling for some time:
This concept has been traced to the 12th century, attributed to Bernard of Chartres. Its most familiar expression in English is by Isaac Newton in 1675: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...
I feel like it's really weird to call what Gödel was doing computer science.
That being said, I view Gödel's addition to be so mind-blowing that I can't help but privately think of him as the founder.
I think everyone with an interest in theoretical CS should work through Turing's 1936 paper at one point in their life. For me, the important part of that paper is how convincingly it argues that the proposed machine model is not just yet another model of computation, but a complete model of computation: that everything you could reasonably call computation is encompassed by these machines.
So there's a finality to Turing's definition of computation: these problems are unsolvable not just with this model, but with any reasonable machine model. It's very hard to make the same case for lambda calculus, which is (in my opinion) a large part of what made Turing's paper so groundbreaking.
Having an educational background in physics I find the Turing Machine a much more intuitive model of computation than say lambda calculus. To me this is Turing’s main contribution: linking the abstract world of computation to the physical world, and proving that a very simple physical machine can perform any computation (Turing completeness). That’s no small contribution.
I think register machines are more intuitive than Turing machines - they are much closer to how real world computers work.