Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Turing Oversold?

people.idsia.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 311 posts

Re: Turing Oversold?

#131

Post by paganel »

netcan wrote: post #38

Just the references here are probably an amazing resource for early computer science, and I'm not going to argue against such a force. Seems to be a lot of uneasiness, of late, about the way credit is allocated in science. IMO, it's mistaken to point this at the top: nobel laureates, heroic icons like Einstein or Turing. These figures are supposed to be idolized and idealized. Yes, this is "untrue," technically. But,…

Not scientists but some of the best writers of the 20th century never got a Nobel, I'm thinking especially about Proust and Kafka (and I would say Céline was more worthy of the Nobel than Camus and especially Sartre), I'm sure the same thing happens in science in regards to this Swedish prize.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#132

Post by jmartrican »

Honest question here, how much of the CS theories play a role in the history of the practical computers we use today? For example, if we play back the history of the the modern computers that we use from a perspective of the CPU (with its instruction set), RAM, disk, high level languages, and operating systems... do they have a foundation in CS theories? Or do these constructs come from a more practical engineering basis, void of theory?

Re: Turing Oversold?

#133

Post by w-j-w »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #117
bo1024 wrote: post #101

We've been over this. Gödel's mu-recursive functions were a poor model of computation because it's completely unclear how to physically implement the arbitrary-function minimization operator. So people didn't see how to build a machine that calculates this way. Similarly, there's no clear way how to mechanize lambda calculus. Turing Machines, on the other hand, were instantly obviously mechanizable. It was clear that…

"For example, it was claimed that Turing founded computer science.[...] Turing's 1936 paper provided the "theoretical backbone" for all computers to come." So your argument is, because it is unclear how to "physically implement the arbitrary-function minimization operator", Turing is the better "theoretical backbone" and has founded computer science?

I think that proving computers could exist in physical reality satisfies this claim very well

Re: Turing Oversold?

#134

Post by netcan »

paganel wrote: post #131
netcan wrote: post #38

Just the references here are probably an amazing resource for early computer science, and I'm not going to argue against such a force. Seems to be a lot of uneasiness, of late, about the way credit is allocated in science. IMO, it's mistaken to point this at the top: nobel laureates, heroic icons like Einstein or Turing. These figures are supposed to be idolized and idealized. Yes, this is "untrue," technically. But,…

Not scientists but some of the best writers of the 20th century never got a Nobel, I'm thinking especially about Proust and Kafka (and I would say Céline was more worthy of the Nobel than Camus and especially Sartre), I'm sure the same thing happens in science in regards to this Swedish prize.

True, but writing has many forms of hero culture. Tolkien doesn't need a nobel, neither does Kafka. They became heroes regardless.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#135

Post by NineStarPoint »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #127
sandwall wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Story telling is how our society has transferred information since we started to communicate-- understanding the map is not the territory, nor should it be. A beautiful narrative can convey important kernels more efficiently than endless minutiae-- Awareness of this is important and elaborations are helpful for those interested in the details. I'm reminded of, "The Glass Bead Game," which discusses an academic societ…

Arguably our storytelling was an efficient hack in an age before writing. A story is a very high-overhead, low SNR way of communicating kernels of truth, but it's robust over time, so it allowed transfer and accumulation of knowledge across societies and generations. But then we've invented and perfected writing, developed symbolic languages and notations (e.g. math, musical), long-duration storage media for text, an…

The main benefit of stories is that they are easier for people to remember than dry details. In terms of communicating knowledge, they are the form that are most likely to stick with us as opposed to going in one ear and out the other. Especially when it comes to areas where someone doesn’t have expertise. This is as you noted incredibly prone to manipulation, but it doesn’t change that it you want a random person picked off the street to actually synthesize the knowledge you’re trying to tell them, a story is by far the way most likely to work. And I’d say that’s important, since knowledge written down somewhere that no one remembers or cares about does nothing to change the way people act.

As far as preserving information goes, no argument there. Stories aren’t a good way to preserve the truth of matters for future generations. To look and determine if the stories told have truth in them requires more detailed writing.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#136

Post by blazespin »

The article is an immature and childish distraction from a potentially interesting discussion (where do good ideas come from).

There is no such thing as The father of anything. That's just one of the many incarnations of the insipid fantasy society has that "Daddy" will solve all your problems.

Turing is absolutely a father of computer science, and his contributions are interesting.

This can be said for any scientist, historically speaking. Even Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants.

Giving this article oxygen is a colossal waste of time. Just because someone somewhere said some stupid thing isn't a reason to write a 10,000 word essay on it with endless citations.

Kinda like what we are doing now..

Re: Turing Oversold?

#137

Post by arethuza »

mlajtos wrote: post #73
jgrahamc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Imitation Game is awful and should never be screened.

It is a good movie . It introduced Turing to the masses in a compassionate way. Also it showed normal people that cryptography, despite being rather boring and mathy, is extremely important in everyday life. I also enjoyed Breaking the Code – https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115749/

I would agree that is an enjoyable movie but also terrible history - but then most movies that deal with historical events are wildly inaccurate - usually for fairly understandable reasons.

I was lucky enough to see the stage version of Breaking the Code - Derek Jacobi was outstanding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyDe8IWAxaY&t=168s

Re: Turing Oversold?

#138

Post by bsedlm »

ogogmad wrote: post #100

I need to find a reference for this: Goedel apparently believed that it was impossible to explicitly enumerate all the partial computable functions over the integers, until Turing proved him wrong. He reasoned as follows: - You can't enumerate the total functions because Cantor's diagonal argument is constructive. Given a claimed enumeration of N^N, you can perform Cantor's diagonal construction to produce a computab…

> The problem is that while a superset of an uncountable set is uncountable, a superset of a computably uncountable set may instead be computably countable. The partial functions over the integers show that this is indeed the case.

> The computable countability of the partial maps from N to N.

Can anybody give an example?

does this have any to do with rationals? or is it more related to limits and calculus?

Re: Turing Oversold?

#140

Post by obastani »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #124
bo1024 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's important to quibble over who's overrated or underrated among these giants of math and CS who already get tons of recognition (I'm glad Schmidhuber brings many other historical names into the narrative). However, yes, I do think that 'mechanization' or physical implementation is a crucial piece of Turing's contribution that is wrongly ignored in this article. And I think without mechanization, ther…

I can only repeat my comment from down: "Likewise, Konrad Zuse never got a Turing award despite having created the world's first working programmable general computer 1935-41. [...] It was pointed out that none of the computers built during the 1940s were influenced in any way by Turing's 1936 theoretical paper, [...]"

As far as I know, Konrad Zuse didn't prove that this strategy was a universal model of computation. In contrast, Turing proved that his universal machine could emulate any other machine, given the right program.

In my view, Turing's contribution is providing a plausible definition of computation along with a deep and comprehensive theoretical characterization of the properties of this model of computation. This is why Turing machines form the basis of theoretical computer science, and not other models such as lambda calculus. I think saying that Turing machines were adopted since they were merely more convenient is highly misleading.

I think this pattern repeats a lot: There are many cases where you can point to multiple people who invented similar ideas around the same time, but it is typically the person who provided the most deep and comprehensive treatment of the subject that ultimately gets most of the credit. This depth is not conveyed in pop science attributions such as "Turing invented computation", but this doesn't mean Turing doesn't deserve the credit.

Post reply on HN