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

The deification of Alan Turing

bellmar.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 41 posts

Re: The deification of Alan Turing

#21

Post by sn41 »

Very slanted article. Turing was hardly unknown to logicians. In fact, even though the undecidability in lambda calculus was proven by Church in 1936 [1], Godel remained unconvinced that it was a complete model of mechanical computation.

It was Turing's paper, in which, among many other things, he showed that Turing machines were equivalent to lambda calculus, that convinced Godel that both Turing machines, and hence lambda calculus, were the right models of mechanical computation.

This was circa 1936, before Turing came to Princeton. So he was hardly unknown to mathematicians even then.

The Turing test and his codebreaking work are of course, well known. Of course, there are other achievements of Turing including a powerful version of the central limit theorem [2] , and "the chemical basis of morphogenesis" [3], to show that he was hardly incapable or obscure. Turing was an original genius, with a wide variety of original views that were later found to be far-reaching.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2371045?origin=crossref&seq=1#m...

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2974762?seq=1#metadata_info_tab...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_Basis_of_Morphoge...

Re: The deification of Alan Turing

#22

Post by cromwellian »

To me the real deity of CS is Donald Knuth, not for theoretical contributions (ok, but TeX now), but for assembling a large swath of computer science into a biblical form which educated a great many people. His books were indispensable for me in the late 80s and early 90s, before you could just go Google anything.

Re: The deification of Alan Turing

#23

Post by r0s »

Side bar: as far as I can tell Turing was the first to use the term "assertion" in the context of software testing.

> How can one check a large routine in the sense of making sure that it's right? In order that the man who checks may not have too difficult a task, the programmer should make a number of definite assertions which can be checked individually, and from which the correctness of the whole program easily follows.

https://turingarchive.kings.cam.ac.uk/publications-lectures-...

Re: The deification of Alan Turing

#24

Post by earleybird »

groby_b wrote: post #9

This is... somewhat untethered from reality? Of course there's a link between mathematics and computing, and it well predates Turing or Berkeley. Starting somewhere with Leibniz' "stepped reckoner", stumbling further along with Babbage, Lovelace, and the many actuarial computers. And that link was very obvious by the time Hilbert & Ackerman formulated the Entscheidungsproblem. Turings biggest contribution to computin…

Turing was working on his Phd[0] and went to Princeton where Church was. Turing recognized that Church's lambda calculus answered the question of what it means to compute (effectively calculable). I think it was Phil Wadler that noted that at this point Turing pivoted his thesis to show equivalence to the lambda calculus.

I find it interesting that Gentzen was not convinced by Church's assertion that the lambda calculus demonstrated effectively calculable functions; however when Gentzen saw that Turning explanation he was finally convinced.

Based on this I'd say that computing has 3 fathers, alternately, a holy trinity :-)

[0] https://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/~acm/turing-phd.pdf

Re: The deification of Alan Turing

#25

Post by SassyGrapefruit »

>It was only later, when the young Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) needed to establish computer science as a legitimate field of study that the history got edited to suggest a smooth evolution from theoretical mathematics to computing

This is a bit conspiratorial. I don't think anyone believes the evolution of computing started with us stumbling around in plato's cave until Turing opened the door. Then Boom! the next day we had macbooks. Of course practical and theoretical computing evolved together. This is hardly unique to computer science. What Turing represents is a person that asked(and answered) the big questions. Take a parallel in physics. Lorentz and Minkowski explored obscure mathematical tools, but Einstein shattered our thinking. Turing did something similar.

Why take it back to Babbage? The abacus was in use in the 11th century BCE. This practical device was a tool to solve a problem. Individuals were not asking "Why does the abacus work?", "What does it mean?", "What can I or can't compute with this thing?", "What other applications are there for calculating machines?". We spent 2,000 years using this tool to count things and not much more. Babbage added some mechanization but he wasn't exactly trying to bridge the abacus with consciousness.

Turing was thinking broadly. When we celebrate Turing we are celebrating the formalization. He gave us a deterministic framework for reasoning about computers. He allowed us to consider their limitations, their philosophical implications, and the opportunities they represent. The huge leaps from the 1960's on would not have been possible without his work.

Re: The deification of Alan Turing

#26

Post by jmeister »

melony wrote: post #16
Animats wrote: post #12

Turing has definitely increased in visibility over the last few decades. Von Neumann was considered the "father of digital computing", because he set down in detail how a general purpose stored-program digital computer ought to work. One was built, and it worked. A few billion Von Neumann architecture machines later... Turing's automata theory work was obscure and not very usable. Turing's code breaking work was very…

They also downplayed Konrad Zuse in history because his story wasn't written by the WWII victors.

Schmidhuber on Zuse v Turing:

(Turing oversold)[https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/turing-oversold.html]

(Turing: Keep his work in perspective)[https://www.nature.com/articles/483541b]

Re: The deification of Alan Turing

#27

Post by ggm »

I suggest people look for Bowden "Faster than Thought" and put Turing in the context of his peers, and publishing of work that was contemporary, and current at the time. he writes in this about his work, alongside Wilkes and others of his contemporaries in the field. Yes, its very UK specific.

https://archive.org/details/faster-than-thought-b.-v.-bowden

Re: The deification of Alan Turing

#28

Post by Oarch »

ahartmetz wrote: post #11
fouc wrote: post #8

I've always understood "Father of " to be fluid, and usually there's more than one possible figure. Turing, or Babbage, or Shannon, etc could all be called that. One organization thinks Turing is the father. So? Who really cares?

Also Konrad Zuse, frequently ignored in the anglosphere. He is one of ~two people with a credible claim to building the first freely programmable (Turing-complete) computer. His first few computers were mechanical, later models electrical.

Going back even further, I'd argue Gottfried Leibnitz was one of the first to grasp the fundamental problems of building a computer.

Re: The deification of Alan Turing

#29

Post by youngtaff »

Animats wrote: post #12

Turing has definitely increased in visibility over the last few decades. Von Neumann was considered the "father of digital computing", because he set down in detail how a general purpose stored-program digital computer ought to work. One was built, and it worked. A few billion Von Neumann architecture machines later... Turing's automata theory work was obscure and not very usable. Turing's code breaking work was very…

Doesn't Tommy Flowers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers) Colossus predate ENIAC?

Flowers wanted a loan from the Bank of England to start a computer company after the war but they didn't believe what he wanted to do was possible, even though he'd already done it (Colossus what classified for years after the war)

Re: The deification of Alan Turing

#30

Post by spupe »

kragen wrote: post #20

It seems like the author doesn't understand, in a fundamental sense, what a computer is. She has been led astray by surface appearances. Digital "computers" are called that because they developed as higher-precision, lower-speed versions of "analog computers", which integrated systems of ordinary differential equations in real time (but faster). Examples included Bush's mechanical differential analyzer, the MONIAC hy…

Thanks for your comment, I think it's insightful. Serious question: why do you write years with five digits?
Post reply on HN