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Turing Oversold?

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Re: Turing Oversold?

#271

Post by bsedlm »

ogogmad wrote: post #141
bsedlm wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that while a superset of an uncountable set is uncountable, a superset of a computably uncountable set may instead be computably countable. The partial functions over the integers show that this is indeed the case. > The computable countability of the partial maps from N to N. Can anybody give an example? does this have any to do with rationals? or is it more related to limits and calculus?

> does this have any to do with rationals? or is it more related to limits and calculus? No. I'm going to use Haskell, which I'm going to assume you know. I'm using it because it seems closer to the math. The type for naturals is: data Nat = Zero | Succ Nat and then all Haskell functions of type `Nat -> Nat` represent partial functions. They're not total functions because they might enter an infinite loop for some in…

> You can clearly enumerate all Haskell functions which are syntactically correct and which have type Nat->Nat

Is this a finite process?

Re: Turing Oversold?

#272

Post by wombatmobile »

jterrys wrote: post #261
wombatmobile wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why Schmidhuber continues to ignore this crucial point. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. But wait a minute, you might say, facts are facts. And if everyone had the time and resources to discover and digest every fact, your understanding would be the end of it. But everyone doesn't have time and resources. To compensate, we…

> https://mjosefweber.medium.com/the-first-computers-were-huma ... I cringe when I read ill-researched essays like these because it informs a relationship between women and computing that back then genuinely did not exist. For the vast, vast majority of women in the field of computing at this time, they were nothing more than glorified calculators. Yes, there were a few women scientists and mathematicians (by few, I…

> These types of essays are a genuine attempt to rewrite a history that did not exist.

I'm not sure what you are saying? Could you clarify?

What is "secretarial style busywork"?

Is this article also "ill-researched"?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...

What would a better researched view of history say?

I'm not trying to troll you or make you write an essay here - just trying to glean the main points of what you believe so I can see your point of view.

Are you familiar with the view that the "Turing Test" was first conceived by Turing as a challenge to discern the gender of a human hidden behind a screen?

In my comment I was trying to point to Turing's interests in the nature of gender and humanity. I find that expansive and prescient in the sense that "computing" to us moderns is more about NLP than calculating maths, and yet, it's all the same thing under the hood.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#273

Post by tialaramex »

cxr wrote: post #159
denton-scratch wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that history is wrong to focus on "chaps" derives from marxism; and Fergusson is very much anti-marxist. The marxian view would be that historical change is the result of economic forces; that if (e.g.) Turing hadn't done it someone else would have, because economics was driving history in that direction. I'm sympathetic to the marxian view of Great Men; I think it's no coincidence that the related work of G…

Alternative angle: among their insights and discoveries, the successes will be shaped by survivorship bias. When deciding what part of one's work to focus on, a person will pursue the things that are close enough to other contemporary work at the time, because it provides a short path to buy-in.

Turing was interested in a bunch of other stuff, but what people know about is the Computer and his war work (at Bletchley Park). His work on say Morphogenesis (why are zebra stripes different on each animal?) is little known.

But Turing probably isn't more important to how you get from the Treaty of Bern in 1874 (creating the UPU thus you could now practically write letters in Paris and send them to New York and it Just Works™ albeit it's expensive and slow) to the Internet than, say, Godel (more fundamental observations about the nature of mathematics that underpin computation) or Grace Hopper (the first compiler although today we'd say this is only a linker). Her Navy bosses couldn't immediately see any value for it. But Grace is apparently the first to make use of the meta-applicability of computing - the minutiae of actually programming the computer are tiresome, a lot of rote tasks perfectly suited to a machine, so, why not have the computer do those parts for you?

Re: Turing Oversold?

#274

Post by tialaramex »

OneEyedRobot wrote: post #168
Banana699 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Also, this is a confusing mess anyway. Turing worked on the Bombe, but that's not a computer at all. Bletchley has one you can see in operation. It's a very complicated machine, but today a child looking at it can't help but wonder if this wouldn't be much easier for a computer.

The Bombe helps break Enigma, and thus is an early part of Ultra and arguably does "save World War 2" but it has no more relevance to your phone or your TikTok app than does the Rubik's cube or the slide rule.

Colossus isn't very far from the Bombe today, you might likely visit both on the same trip, but Turing didn't build it, and although it's clearly in some sense a computer, it is critically lacking in some features you'd want from a general purpose computer since it had a single purpose, to break Tunny in the mid 1940s.

In some sense Colossus is relevant to your phone and TikTok, because it is a computer, but, Turing didn't work on it and it isn't their direct ancestor by any means at all.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#275

Post by ekianjo »

mannykannot wrote: post #165
ekianjo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

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

You can't tell a complex story in a short time and numerous characters on screen. In books you can. In movies it's borderline impossible and therefore simplifying/dumbing things down is a filter you need to apply first.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#276

Post by Dylan16807 »

hardlianotion wrote: post #246
Dylan16807 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The size number of the unbounded tape size is always finite, is that better?

Re: Turing Oversold?

#277

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

tialaramex wrote: post #270
SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you take "computer" to mean "something that computes". In that case it would include humans. There was a great deal of research into things that can be effectively computed that goes back even before the focus of this article. And of course "computer" used to refer to humans who computed before the invention of mechanical computers. But it's certainly not the study of what mechanical computers can do. Among…

A whole bunch of Computer Science is only relevant for actual computers not Turing Machines. When I was (a student) at University they didn't teach Wait-Free versus Lock-Free concurrent algorithms, but that's an important 21st century topic because actual computers today are capable of many simultaneous operations, and it's totally possible to write a program that isn't even Lock-free and may literally make no progre…

Yes that is true. There are applied sub-disciplines for all of the science. Typically you would call that something like "applied computer science" or "computer engineering", but CS is new enough that it hasn't split like that yet.

Nobody is saying that's not important. But the field as a whole began before mechanical computers were invented or practical, and there are several subfields that are basically indistinguishable from mathematics.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#278

Post by teruakohatu »

jhgb wrote: post #269
teruakohatu wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That almost sounds to me like saying that the Wright brothers "made a few simple flights". Richard Pearse gets written off in the same way to elevate the Wright brothers flying accomplishments. Pearse was just perusing powered flight as hobby in rural New Zealand, didn't bother informing the press and didn't bother even telling the government until WWII, 40 years later, about his flights and engineering designs. ht…

Not sure what improvement Pearse made over, say, Ader.

Pearse archived semi-controlled flight 300 cm above the ground verses Ader's uncontrolled ground effect flight 20cm above the ground.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#279

Post by jecel »

cybernautique wrote: post #185
generalizations wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm convinced that David Harland's Rekursiv[1:] machine _is_ the manner by which lambda et al. might be implemented at the machine level. Unfortunately, Rekursiv seems to have died an ignominious death, with the last Rekursiv chip having fallen off the side of a steamboat (apocrypha; I remember having read this, but I'm unable to find the original citation.) The Rekursiv advantage is its ability to do recursion on th…

I always mention the Rekursiv in my talk about Smalltalk computers. Its problem was being a CISC in the era of RISC. The Manchester Mushroom from just a little later had initially the same problem but went through a major redesign when they saw the JIT compilers for Self on the Sun Sparc processor.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#280

Post by jecel »

tialaramex wrote: post #268
mcguire wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe anyone has received a Turing award for creating a working computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wilkes His Turing award citation: "Professor Wilkes is best known as the builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program."

I think Wilkes got his award for his software contributions despite being well known for his hardware efforts.

The 2009 award to Chuck Thacker, on the other hand, was clearly based on his contributions to hardware. I have the impression that ACM had a change in policy around that time.

But officially I seem to be wrong:

https://amturing.acm.org/bysubject.cfm?cat=16 https://amturing.acm.org/bysubject.cfm?cat=15

In the "hardware" category Wilkes is listed as the only one, while Thacker, with Brooks, Cocke and Wilkes are in the "computer architecture" category.

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