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Turing Oversold?

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Re: Turing Oversold?

#161

Post by HideousKojima »

arethuza wrote: post #44
formerly_proven wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find so strange about The Imitation Game that all of this is pretty well-known; anyone who has skimmed the Wikipedia article of Turing and the overview article on breaking Enigma knows that the movie is pretty much complete horseshit. Most of the alterations in the movie removed things that would have made the movie more interesting instead of the utterly bland story they made up.

I'm struggling to think of any movies that are really historically accurate - the point is to tell a good story to get people to watch it to make a profit. Edit: I'm Scottish so Braveheart is the obvious example - entertaining movie but wildly inaccurate and even manages to get who/what the term "braveheart" refers to wrong.

Gettysburg and its prequel (Gods and Generals). The dialogue and character motivations may or may not be accurate, but the battles it depicts are pretty accurate.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#162

Post by cfcf14 »

jimhefferon wrote: post #144
KingOfCoders wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

The question in the air in 36-ish was something like, "OK, clearly we can mechanically compute things like the sum of two numbers or the prime factorization of a number. But are there other things that can be computed with a discrete and deterministic mechanism?" (At the time they called these "effective" functions.) Church had piles of stuff that he and his students produced that were computable with the lambda calc…

Wonderful explanation, thank you.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#163

Post by yesOfCourse9 »

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…

He does not?

He is crafting a tapestry not being black and white.

They all worked together to refine an overall concept and get somewhere useable.

IMO it’s the simpler mind that needs a stark black and white assignment. Talk about missing the forest for a tree.

Constantly iterating which daddy figure should be on top of the mental hierarchy, when clearly it’s network effects.

Humanity is still emerging from its mental models of society of old.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#164

Post by OrderlyTiamat »

pvg wrote: post #16
pantulis wrote: post #4

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…

even Einstein also stood in the shoulders of giants 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've heard this quote explained as an insult directed to one of Newtons enemies (either Leibiz or Hooke), referencing their short height. I'm not convinced it's true, but it is an amusing possibility.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#165

Post by mannykannot »

ekianjo wrote: post #77
jgrahamc wrote: post #2

There's some confusion towards the end about Engima and Colossus: However, his greatest impact came probably through his contribution to cracking the Enigma code, used by the German military during the Second World War. He worked with Gordon Welchman at Bletchley Park in the UK. The famous code-breaking Colossus machine, however, was designed by Tommy Flowers (not by Turing). The British cryptographers built on earli…

> It's so bad it shouldn't be considered canon. Since when are movies supposed to be accurate historical references? They are made to be entertaining, so facts get kicked out of the door from Day 1.

It is not like you cannot tell a good story here without embellishing and distorting it.

As it happens, Verity Stobb panned the movie (justifiably, IMHO), in her splendidly British style, for much more than just getting the facts wrong.

https://www.theregister.com/2015/01/26/verity_stob_turing_mo...

Re: Turing Oversold?

#166

Post by OneEyedRobot »

pyentropy wrote: post #6

The average person has no clue what theoretical computer science is. But science fields do need marketing. All children have heroes they look up to. Putting focus on Turing's achievements is merely creating a pop star figure in the mainstream, which I think is a good thing: a smart dude works on a problem that saves World War 2 and now powers your phone and your TikTok app. Once you are actually interested in the fie…

>All children have heroes they look up to.

After reading that I sat here for a minute and racked my brain as to who my childhood 'hero' might be. I can't remember a single person.

It's amusing to me how much of intellectual work deals in a currency of status. Getting/giving credit for things appears to be the Prime Directive, at least among the observers. We've now graduated to not only stressing who is responsible but what demographic groups they are a part of.

Now, it could be that the real deal groundbreaking folks don't give a damn. Tip o' the hat to those people.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#167

Post by reedf1 »

breuleux wrote: post #98
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,…

Why do we need idols, though? If there was no narrative, no idols, no celebrities, would people be less motivated to do science? Why do we need to lie to ourselves so? > If you're already deeply interested in computer science, of course the detailed narrative recognizing dozens of brilliant early computer scientists is richer. Of course! Personally I'm mostly uninterested in who did what, but maybe that's just me. It…

Idolatry seems like an emergent property of human collective consciousness. You can try to ignore it (it's been tried), downplay it (also been tried), and ban it (and again).

Re: Turing Oversold?

#168

Post by OneEyedRobot »

Banana699 wrote: post #91
pyentropy wrote: post #6

The average person has no clue what theoretical computer science is. But science fields do need marketing. All children have heroes they look up to. Putting focus on Turing's achievements is merely creating a pop star figure in the mainstream, which I think is a good thing: a smart dude works on a problem that saves World War 2 and now powers your phone and your TikTok app. Once you are actually interested in the fie…

>a smart dude works on a problem that saves World War 2 and now powers your phone and your TikTok app. The vast majority of people working anywhere near mathematics, physical sciences or electrical engineering (the 3 founding pillars of CS) in the 1920s and 1930s probably worked on problems related to WW2 during WW2. You can equally state that motivating claim for a lot of other people. I think Turing gets the Media…

>a smart dude works on a problem that saves World War 2 and now powers your phone and your TikTok app.

So much for the Polish Cipher Bureau. Not so many tragic hero opportunities there.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#169

Post by johncearls »

iainmerrick wrote: post #94
rtpg wrote: post #13

After watching the Imitation Game, I did some googling/trying to find out how the Bombe worked. I expected it to not be very exact, but I also kinda felt like the entire narrative around that history in the industry was just super off! - 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 bigge…

I knew some of the real history beforehand and the movie really annoyed me, so I’m glad to hear you were able to uncover the facts yourself and had a similar reaction! Among so much that’s just plain wrong, I really dislike the insidious idea that Turing’s horrible punishment at the hands of the state was wrong because he was a unique genius and war hero. No, it was wrong because he was a human being and being gay sh…

I think the attraction to the Turing story is that it is a classical tragedy. If what happened to him happened to any gay man, it would be wrong. But since it happened to one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century, who may have had other breakthroughs that could have pushed mankind forward, it is a tragedy. A tragedy for all mankind. Mankind suffered a huge loss due to its own moral failures.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#170

Post by arduinomancer »

wirthjason wrote: post #78

A fascinating book on Turing and Church is “The Annotated Turing”. It’s a walk through of Turings paper with analysis and commentary. It was written by Charles Petzold, who also wrote the immensity popular book “CODE”. https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Turing-Through-Historic-Com...

+1

It’s pretty easy to understand from an average programmer’s perspective

I found the proofs at the end are a bit hard to follow but it’s not really critical to understand them if you just want to know what a Turing Machine is and the history/context behind it

I thought it was really interesting how Turing defines what are essentially “macros” for the machine

For example copy or erase

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