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Turing Oversold?

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Re: Turing Oversold?

#221

Post by kerblang »

bjornsing wrote: post #18

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.

So okay yeah it's Turing Completeness that matters the most to me as computer science, on a purely pragmatic basis: When people are pitching the latest whiz-bang doodad, the answer is always, "This isn't doing anything we couldn't already do, so how does it make things easier and do it efficiently enough for our purposes?" That's the proper question when it comes to monads, coroutines, actors, non-blocking blah blah, etc. etc.

That's really important in an industry saturated with hype, elitism and general nonsense. Anything I can do in Rust, you can do in Assembly, so I've got some explaining to do (I can probably succeed in this example, others maybe not).

If Turing actually failed to deliver the goods on "completeness", I'd really like to resolve that.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#222

Post by simorley »

If hollywood made a movie about it, then it most likely is oversold.

> especially in the Anglosphere.

What does he expect. We've always done this. Whether it is with thomas edison, the wright brothers, etc. Each nation/ethnic group oversells their achievements and minimizes others. We also did that in terms of gender/race. Women and minorities have been undersold.

The germans do the same thing. Gutenberg didn't invent the movable type. It existed in china, korea, etc for centuries before gutenburg.

It's human nature. All nations/groups do this. Imagine how native americans feel when we tell them columbus discovered the americas.

Everything the author wrote appears valid though. Turing didn't invent the computer. He didn't create computer science. He didn't win ww2. What he did is solve Hilbert's Decision Problem ( which church did before turing ) in a very interesting manner. With or without Turing, we'd still have computers, we'd still have computer science and we'd still have won ww2.

But sadly, the masses need heroes and heroes are created/manufactured by their advocates. Turing for a variety of reasons has more advocates than church, godel, etc. And unfortunately for the writer, it's an anglo world and our message will be the loudest and most visible.

The author states the truth but he is a lone voice in the wilderness. A few thousand will probably read his factual article while millions will watch the misleading "The Imitation Game" and read the misleading articles from the media. It must be frustating for the author, but truth is at a disadvantage to fiction here.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#223

Post by simonh »

nzmsv wrote: post #95
simonh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Disagree. A finely crafted but ultimately false story can be actively harmful. A young person may think that they are not of the same caliber as "the greats" and cannot make their mark on a field, which would discourage them from trying. All the while in reality "the greats" were never as great as the historians later depicted them. "Come on in, collaborate, and make a difference" would be a much more positive messag…

Nobody here is advocating telling false stories. Saying that Turing laid the foundations for computer science is not false. It's a perfectly valid opinion to hold. We might say it's a simplification, or even an exaggeration, arguably saying he's one of them might be better, but it's not a false statement.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#224

Post by lostmsu »

dnautics wrote: post #193
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…

> I don't understand why Schmidhuber continues to ignore this crucial point. From TFA: > There is a seemingly minor difference whose significance emerged only later. Many of Gödel's instruction sequences were series of multiplications of number-coded storage contents by integers. Gödel did not care that the computational complexity of such multiplications tends to increase with storage size. Similarly, Church also ig…

It is important for engineering, but as far as I understand it is not that important for math. E.g. Gödel solved the completeness and consistency problems, and Church first solved the decidability.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#225

Post by jhgb »

dralley wrote: post #147
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…

Likewise, people dispute that Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, because Babbage and Menabrea had previously created a few simple example programs. But that downplays her accomplishments too much. She didn't write the "first program" but she was the first to understand what computers would be capable of doing (for example, that by assigning numbers to letters and symbols, computers could do more than simply perfo…

> because Babbage and Menabrea had previously created a few simple example programs.

That almost sounds to me like saying that the Wright brothers "made a few simple flights".

> first to invent foundational control flow structures such as loops

I wonder how sigma notation fits into this. Clearly the notion of expressing arbitrarily repeated operations using a fixed amount of information (which is what a loop is, essentially) was known at least to Euler.

Also, the fact that the machine enabled these things in the first place (unlike even some of the later machines such as Z3) suggests that its designer was either aware of this necessity to begin with, or at the very least in possession of preternatural prescience. In that case the use of these features in some programs but not in others would be not a matter of inventing them in the former programs but instead a matter of choosing to exploit existing hardware features, or declining to do so, depending on what program you're looking at.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#226

Post by sytelus »

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…

Computers we use are nothing like Turing machine and if you want to credit one person for computer design than it would be van Neumann. Media needs hero worship. It doesn't matter who will be hero but they must have one. This applies to every field. Every scientist, enterprenuer, artist is overblown. Older they are, more overblown they are. The worse case is movie actors who literally everyone knows are not "hero" but just the human puppets who move and behaves as how directors asks and writers dictact, but in the eye of people they are literally called "hero" and "star". The people moving these puppets are only mentioned in credits who no one reads.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#227

Post by lordnacho »

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…

You seem like someone who might have a good book about this bit of history? Or perhaps a blog?

Re: Turing Oversold?

#228

Post by wedowhatwedo »

sytelus wrote: post #226
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…

Computers we use are nothing like Turing machine and if you want to credit one person for computer design than it would be van Neumann. Media needs hero worship. It doesn't matter who will be hero but they must have one. This applies to every field. Every scientist, enterprenuer, artist is overblown. Older they are, more overblown they are. The worse case is movie actors who literally everyone knows are not "hero" bu…

Best I can tell, von Neumann stole the design that bears his name from John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. von Neumann doesn't seem to deserve as much much credit as he is given. I'm not saying he does not deserve credit for his other work.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#229

Post by jrochkind1 »

lostmsu wrote: post #224
dnautics wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why Schmidhuber continues to ignore this crucial point. From TFA: > There is a seemingly minor difference whose significance emerged only later. Many of Gödel's instruction sequences were series of multiplications of number-coded storage contents by integers. Gödel did not care that the computational complexity of such multiplications tends to increase with storage size. Similarly, Church also ig…

It is important for engineering, but as far as I understand it is not that important for math. E.g. Gödel solved the completeness and consistency problems, and Church first solved the decidability.

The OP itself documents:

> Nevertheless, according to Wang,[WA74-96] it was Turing's work (1936) that convinced Gödel of the universality of both his own approach (1931-34) and Church's (1935).

Unless "according to Wang" is meant as "I don't know if I believe it", then apparently it's documented that Godel himself thought Turing's contribution was major and shed important light on the mathematical implications of godel's own work.

There's never any one person that invents anything, it's always built on work that came before.

Reading the OP, I got increasingly bored and tired... ok, what's your point? Yes, clearly Godel and Church especially did foundational work without which Turing's work would not be possible -- and I don't think anyone denies it, anyone with any kind of computer science education is surely familiar with Godel and Church. It's not like they are languishing in obscurity, they are both very well known and respected! Godel especially is widely considered a real giant in his fields. I am as confident that neither Godel nor Church is going to be forgotten for many generations.

But Turing made important contributions that took important steps necessary for the development of CS as a field. It's not a mystery or undeserved why Turing's name ends up remembered.

The OP's point is just that any singular "inventor" is always building on work of may who have come before? OK, sure. Boring. So we should never promote anyone as making important foundational contributions? Well, people aren't gonna stop. Boring.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#230

Post by Dylan16807 »

nzmsv wrote: post #155
UncleMeat wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where the humanities has the tech world beat. While we quibble over correct narratives and seek one option, the humanities has been completely soaked in the idea that there are nearly unlimited narratives that describe any given human endeavor and they weave together into a rich and ever-changing tapestry. This is why a historian can read, understand (both the pros and the cons), and respect books that repres…

So can I continue to prefer my narrative? It seems to gather some upvotes and some downvotes, so at least it is interesting and elicits a reaction :) Also, the more I learn about my heroes the more I realize that they never saw themselves as ubermensch. If anything, self doubt seems to be the common thread. I think this angle does not get enough attention. However, I agree with you on a broader point. This is just on…

> So can I continue to prefer my narrative? It seems to gather some upvotes and some downvotes, so at least it is interesting and elicits a reaction :)

I think most of that reaction isn't coming from your narrative on history, it's from accusing other commenter's narratives of being false.

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