181–190 of 311 posts
But Gödel is incredibly famous, isn't he? I don't see why there's a need to give him more credit.
Also it is weird that this article doesn't have a couple paragraphs on Von Neumann, he's underappreciated and also very cool.
I'm not going to comment on the actual content that is mostly [1] scientifically correct, but Schmidhuber (the author) has a record of wanting to be the center of attention [2] (even though LeCun is not better on that matter). Also, a third of the sources are written by him... Just look at his previous blog post [3], in which he explains that the most cited neural networks all cite works by him. These papers cite doz…
> of wanting to be the center of attention It seemed more like he felt he was unfairly being uncredited. Which is probably why he wrote this - he now cares deeply about giving credit to the right people.
I understand why he'd care about that if he'd been uncredited and watched peers be overcredited, but I'd hardly call it a noble work, even if it is understandable.
In the fields of computing and mathematics, nobody (hopefully) believes bunk like that Turing started computer science or invented the first computer. My reactions to all that were, "what? who thinks that, and why don't they check the Wikipedia?"
If such beliefs are circulating among laypeople, it is good to debunk them. But doing so in this article (especially while failing to acknowledge that they are strictly lay myths that no mathematician or computer scientist believes) detracts its main thesis, which is about the excessive attribution to particular individuals, while others are ignored/forgotten.
Turing is not excessively attributed with anything in our field. He's frequently referenced, mainly because he articulated a concrete model of computation which can be simulated and using which proofs can be made about computability.
I mean, academia doesn't habitually make up lies about who did what, especially if they are not coming from that person or persons. I.e. if you don't misrepresent your work yourself, the field is generally not going to step in and do that for you. Embellishing the exploits and contributions of some eminent persona may be what some careless journalists or bloggers sometimes do, but that's neither here nor there.
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We also shouldn't underestimate the importance of truth. Dealing with the world as-it-is has better results than interacting with a story we'd like to be true but isn't. People waste their lives in service of causes and ideas that just are not grounded in reality. Not just in the philosophical sense that we cannot know truth, but in the practical sense of "the outcome you want will not flow from the actions you are t…
I'm not advocating telling lies. Sometimes we simplify, and doing so can be perfectly appropriate. Unfortunately that does open the stage for nitpicking and pedantry.
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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…
I'm still a little confused. It seems like Turing came up with something that works, and clearly fulfills precisely what Godel and Church and Turing were all looking for; but it also seems like it's a mathematically inelegant solution. Is it possible that in the future we'll find a way to show that Gödel's mu-recursive functions or Church's lambda calculus also precisely describe 'what a machine can do'? If so, it se…
The Rekursiv advantage is its ability to do recursion on the bare-metal. It's described as an object-oriented architecture. Its memory was a persistent store of objects, with each object having its size, type, and position known in memory.
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…
So, Founding Fathers of computing science becomes mixed - starting from those low brow thinkers we call journalists - with the idea of Founding Father of computing. And this is not only unfair, but technically wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm still a little confused. It seems like Turing came up with something that works, and clearly fulfills precisely what Godel and Church and Turing were all looking for; but it also seems like it's a mathematically inelegant solution. Is it possible that in the future we'll find a way to show that Gödel's mu-recursive functions or Church's lambda calculus also precisely describe 'what a machine can do'? If so, it se…
Yes, the set of functions computable with mu recursion, or with lambda calculus, is the same as the set of functions computable with a Turing machine. (Turing in his original paper showed that the set is the same for his system and Church's, and the proofs for mu recursion and many other systems are well-known.)
> I'll totally agree that from a teacher's perspective, the Turing machine is the better explanation.
When I learned this, the instructor did not use Turing machines. They used mu recursion. That has the advantage that you don't first define a machine and then derive the set of functions, instead you go straight to the functions. But I agree that Sipser (which I understand to be the most popular text today) defines a computable function as one that is computed by Turing machine, and to my mind that has the advantage of honestly suggesting to students what they are about.
What Turing did in 1937 might not have been an advance over what Godel and Church did. But if you want to make the case for building a general purpose computer out of mechanical relays or vacuum tubes in 1946, you need a semantic advance. Turing machines did that.
Nobody would read Godel and say "let's build ENIAC." Tommy Flowers did read Turing and say that. THAT is the difference.
It's like Einstein versus Lorenz. Same mathematics.Different semantic interpretation.
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>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…
Oversensitive and hyper-reactive? Jailing or sterilizing gay people for having sex is evil. End of story. It has only been 20 years since this was the law in some US states. I see no reason why vigorous rejection of this sort of policy as monstrous can possibly be seen as "oversensitive and hyper-reactive".
The point isn't that this oversensitivity is misplaced, the point is that it's moral outrage porn that the tellers of the story use in a smart way to get a reaction from you.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing if it's just one or two story among others, after all the purpose of art is to get strong reactions out of its audience. But when every such story has to lean hard into the moral aspect to the exclusion of all else it becomes a trite children story told for nothing else but feel-good points.
Consider the amount of articles on trump during his presidency. How much of it was high-quality investigative journalism telling you things you don't know, and how much was "Trump tweeted something shockingly stupid, here are a list of experts you don't need telling you this is shockingly stupid, this means End Of Democracy (EOD)" ? The latter articles are technically true, but it's trite and accomplishes nothing but pulling on your memetic levers to get you to like/share/feel-bad|good-all-day.
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…
> Turing Machines, on the other hand, were instantly obviously mechanizable. It was clear that one could build a physical machine to run any Turing program without human input. Harold Abelson points out in one of his lectures [0] that computer science isn't about computers any more than biology is about microscopes. From that perspective, it is clear that Turing found an existing discipline of computer science and ma…