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Turing Oversold?

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Re: Turing Oversold?

#241

Post by jagrsw »

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…

  > Polish mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki
  > and Henryk Zygalski who were the first to break the Enigma
  > code
I was in ~2010 or so in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. There was some exhibition related to Enigma there or maybe Enigma device on display (I don't remember what was it exactly now).

The person who toured us around was telling us a brief story of how the Enigma was broken, starting with Bletchley Park. Me or maybe my friend asked who was the first to break Enigma, and he immediately answered that it was Turing, then noticed our puzzled face expressions, and added something along 'ah.. yeah.. and Polish did some minor work too' :). Just an anecdote.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#242

Post by bodge5000 »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #197
bodge5000 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the more noble cause for that would be giving more credit to others, rather than attempting to take away credit from a well known figure. This article is somewhat about the other important figures who's knowledge Turing's was built off, but its central point is that Turing gets too much credit. I understand why he'd care about that if he'd been uncredited and watched peers be overcredited, but I'd hardly call…

The article is full of credit given to a huge number of people.

The article is called Turing oversold, and the article is all about who should be getting credit instead of Turing. This isn't "Hey, are you aware of all these people who helped develop computer science", its "Turing is overcredited, heres a list of other people to support my argument"

Re: Turing Oversold?

#243

Post by toyg »

chagen wrote: post #217
dilap wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really enjoyed Stephen Wolfram's mini-bio of her. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-t... I very much recoginized from that that she had the attitude and experience of a "programmer," so I would say she was the first programmer, in the modern sense.

Ada Lovelace's father was Lord Byron?! TIL

Look for Sydney Padua's comics for a lot of weird and strange facts about Lovelace and Babbage. (To be fair, Babbage was much weirder)

Re: Turing Oversold?

#244

Post by toyg »

wedowhatwedo wrote: post #228
sytelus wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Both you and parent are correct: Von Neumann knew how to play the game to end up with "the credits people do read".

Re: Turing Oversold?

#245

Post by Karrot_Kream »

cybernautique wrote: post #234
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'm confused as to why this is more than simply an interesting formalism. Complexity theory and models of computation are largely based around the Turing Machine model. Lambda calculus is an effective lens to design programming languages and prove equivalence between programs. We know by way of the Church-Turing Thesis that these two models are equivalent. The Turing Machine model is both better studied from…

For me, personally, I really like the lambda calculus as a tool to organize and better my computational thinking. I came into programming/computer science from a mathematics degree; I read some old treatises on recursion theory[1] and fell in love. I couldn't ever quite wrap my head around the Turing Machine formalism, but kept at it for a while. Finding Barendregt's paper [2] was a huge shock! I grasped it much quic…

FWIW Nothing wrong with having fun with computing, and implementing lambda calculus on bare-metal can be as fun as any other computational exploration, so good on ya!

Thanks for clearing up that it's the formalism you find interesting. Also, to offer a counterpoint, I'm also from a math background, but I was more of an analysis person (as much as one can be in mathematics where it's all related) than an algebra person, and when I did some FP research, it often felt like where all the algebraists go to play computer science. I feel like analysts are underrepresented in PLT (and overrepresented in complexity theory!) but this is already going off-topic, so cheers.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#246

Post by hardlianotion »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #233
hardlianotion wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Including me. What is the difference?

In a theoretical sense, an unbounded number is always finite. In a practical sense, turing machines don't voraciously consume tape. Adding extra feet of tape gives you an exponential increase in what you can compute. So if you set up a program to be reasonably judicious with its tape use, you can just say that if it reaches an end you pause it for a day, head to the shop, and buy another reel. Big computations take a…

Any given number is always bounded. I am not sure it makes sense to talk about an unbounded number

Re: Turing Oversold?

#247

Post by Ar-Curunir »

dnautics wrote: post #195
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer Science is about what computers can do. To decide the latter, you have to first decide what a computer is. Turing Machines were the first abstractions that intuitively captured what it means to compute something

that's not the case, according to the article. If anything the article implies the opposite. Turing machines were a re-abstraction of Godel's computational model that provided a path to mechanical realization. Also if you ever work with the turing machine (NFA hooked up to an infinite recording tape) it is not at all "intuitive" that this construction comprehensively captures the world of computation.

Godel's computational model does not intuitively capture what it means to compute. Godel himself was unconvinced that his model was universal, and it took Turing's paper to convince him that his model, lambda calculus, and Turing machines were equivalent and universal.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#248

Post by bodge5000 »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #199
bodge5000 wrote: post #176

The problem with technically correct allocation of of credit is that to be truly technically correct, it gets very messy very quickly, as all knowledge is built on other knowledge. The credit for founding computer science would be "[absolutely massive list of people] and finally of course, the one we call Ung, who discovered the wheel". That might seem pedantic and it is, but you need to define exactly where the line…

Those aren’t the only options. We can give credit without creating mythic heros. Giving technically correct precise allocation of credit is messy, you’re right. But so is defining what ‘tall’ means, so the precision is beside the point. You don’t need to define exactly where the line is drawn. It reminds me of voting systems, but maybe that’s just because of the election yesterday. If you want to give singular nontra…

Defining tall doesn't matter so much, a) because we have a precise measure of height and b) because we all know and fully understand that the definition of tall is completely subjective. You might say the same thing about credit, but then you also need to accept that for a lot of people will gravitate towards these mythic heroes as appropriate credit.

The problem with my wheel example is that it demonstrates the absurdity of trying to assign credit to anyone involved, but it doesn't quite demonstrate how difficult it is to even draw a rough line. Does the inventor of the abacus get credit in the creation of computer science? The discovery of electricity? And what about all the (comparatively) minor inventions and discoveries off the back of those?

As far as I can see it, it either needs to be completely subjective, or there needs to be a line. Maybe it doesn't need to be incredibly specific, although at that point some subjectivity creeps back in

Re: Turing Oversold?

#249

Post by titzer »

FTA:

> They did not exploit this—Turing used his (quite inefficient) model only to rephrase the results of Gödel and Church on the limits of computability.

That's an infuriating sentence, as the author clearly has no clue how insanely inefficient Church numerals are. For those who don't know, Church numerals are literally a unary encoding of integers as repeatedly applied functions.

I read a lot of this article and at no point was I nodding along, but at this point I just had to pause and vent. This person has something against Turing to the point that it's just weird.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#250

Post by amw-zero »

This did not convince me that Turing's accomplishments are exaggerated. Anyone who knows computing history knows that there are many people involved. But Turing's contributions are not overstated, they are just accurate. That doesn't mean that he was the only computer scientist in the world.
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