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Turing Oversold?

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Re: Turing Oversold?

#31

Post by rich_sasha »

fmajid wrote: post #12

His cryptographic achievements during WW2 were also vastly oversold. Most of the theoretical breakthroughs needed to crack Enigma were made by Polish mathematicians, but it was more palatable for the British government to put a Brit forward, just as they did for penicillin.

I think this is true of Enigma as of start of WWII. But Enigma was modified many times over the duration of the war, needing not just "number crunching" but genuinely new methods.

So Enigma was genuinely re-broken, a few times, at Bletchley Park, indeed by an all-British team, but yes, easy to forget the little people who did all the initial work.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#32

Post by jgrahamc »

rtpg wrote: post #13

After watching the Imitation Game, I did some googling/trying to find out how the Bombe worked. I expected it to not be very exact, but I also kinda felt like the entire narrative around that history in the industry was just super off! - The core mechanisms of the machine for running the Enigma "quickly" was from the Polish - The machine wasn't even a generalized computer! I just felt really misled! Perhaps the bigge…

The Imitation Game was inaccurate and horrible every way you look at it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Historical_...

Re: Turing Oversold?

#33

Post by jgrahamc »

mhh__ wrote: post #30

Relative to the 0 times I have ever heard his name mentioned vs. the countless times I have read about him on manic midnight wikipedia binges, I think Zuse seems very unsung.

Agreed. Zuse did a lot of cool stuff.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#34

Post by skissane »

nightcracker wrote: post #27
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.

> and proving that a very simple physical machine can perform any computation (Turing completeness) Not proving, conjecturing. It's not proven until this day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis

It can never be “proven” because the notion of “any computation” being referred to is informal.

Also, it can’t perform any computation, if we say hypercomputation is a form of computation. Hypercomputation is (as far as we know) physically impossible, but so strictly speaking are Turing machines - a true Turing machine has unlimited storage, and an unlimited amount of time in which to complete its computations - any Turing machine you could physically construct would only be a finite approximation of a real one.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#36

Post by kreetx »

pantulis wrote: post #4

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…

This is just a theory, but I think this (assigning some major leap of science to few specific persons) is how society remembers things. I.e it is difficult, or even impossible, to go into the intricate histories of how things actually developed in middle or high school (and perhaps even in college), thus the people teaching us simplify it to make it easier to study and remember.

Once you start digging you realize that nothing is as simple. For example for physics, "Physics for Poets" by Robert H. March is an eye opener.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#37

Post by formerly_proven »

jgrahamc wrote: post #32
rtpg wrote: post #13

After watching the Imitation Game, I did some googling/trying to find out how the Bombe worked. I expected it to not be very exact, but I also kinda felt like the entire narrative around that history in the industry was just super off! - The core mechanisms of the machine for running the Enigma "quickly" was from the Polish - The machine wasn't even a generalized computer! I just felt really misled! Perhaps the bigge…

The Imitation Game was inaccurate and horrible every way you look at it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Historical_...

What I find so strange about The Imitation Game that all of this is pretty well-known; anyone who has skimmed the Wikipedia article of Turing and the overview article on breaking Enigma knows that the movie is pretty much complete horseshit. Most of the alterations in the movie removed things that would have made the movie more interesting instead of the utterly bland story they made up.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#38

Post by netcan »

Just the references here are probably an amazing resource for early computer science, and I'm not going to argue against such a force.

Seems to be a lot of uneasiness, of late, about the way credit is allocated in science. IMO, it's mistaken to point this at the top: nobel laureates, heroic icons like Einstein or Turing. These figures are supposed to be idolized and idealized. Yes, this is "untrue," technically. But, it serves many purposes. A nobel prize win elevates science by singling out scientists for hero status. Achilles elevated Greece by giving Greeks something to collectively aspire to or adulate.

If you're already deeply interested in computer science, of course the detailed narrative recognizing dozens of brilliant early computer scientists is richer. Of course!

Where poor credit allocation matters isn't historical hero narratives, it's at the working scientist level. The grants & positions level. Here, it's important to be accurate, fair, etc. Being inaccurate, unfair or corrupt at this level creates actual deficits.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#39

Post by skissane »

bjornsing wrote: post #25
skissane wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find the Turing Machine a much more intuitive model of computation than say lambda calculus I think register machines are more intuitive than Turing machines - they are much closer to how real world computers work.

Yes, on the abstract computation side of the link register machines are much more intuitive. But on the physical side of the link they are much less intuitive IMHO: it’s much less clear that “this is just a machine that I could build in my garage”.

The “physical side” was probably more important when Turing first came up with the idea, and people struggled to conceive of computers because none had yet been built. Nowadays it is arguably less necessary because they are an essential part of everyday life, and most people learn some programming before learning theoretical computer science.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#40

Post by Labo333 »

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 dozens of papers, so a lot of other groups that are active in AI can claim the same thing...

[1]: For example, Turing published an independent proof of the Entscheidungsproblem, in the [TUR] article, just a month after Church, that the article forgets to highlight.

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Schmidhuber#Views

[3]: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/most-cited-neural-nets.html

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