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Turing Oversold?

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Re: Turing Oversold?

#41

Post by netcan »

kreetx wrote: post #36
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 tha…

A typical medieval depiction of a great siege might be one king and two or three famous knights with a ladder assaulting a 5 foot castle manned by another king and a knight. Distilling stories to a handful of characters seems to make it easier for us to digest. I suppose it's easier for us to imagine ourselves as one of these people.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#42

Post by vmilner »

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…

It seems a bit surprising not to mention specifically the harder _naval_ Enigma and the U-boat threat in the context of Turing.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#43

Post by goto11 »

formerly_proven wrote: post #37
jgrahamc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given the movie was a major box office hit and critically acclaimed, I suspect the producers knew what they were doing.

Just don't expect historical accuracy from a Hollywood movie. Cleopatra didn't look like Elizabeth Taylor either.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#44

Post by arethuza »

formerly_proven wrote: post #37
jgrahamc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm struggling to think of any movies that are really historically accurate - the point is to tell a good story to get people to watch it to make a profit.

Edit: I'm Scottish so Braveheart is the obvious example - entertaining movie but wildly inaccurate and even manages to get who/what the term "braveheart" refers to wrong.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#45

Post by erhk »

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…

Disruption is a canary word to me now.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#46

Post by hutzlibu »

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.

"I think Zuse seems very unsung"

Of what I know, this might be, because he worked for the Nazis and his prototypes were mostly destroyed in the war and somewhat forgotten and seemed to have not been influential to the general branch of computing.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#47

Post by simonh »

netcan wrote: post #38

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,…

Right, we shouldn't underestimate the importance of narratives. We need narratives about the theoretical foundations of computer science, and Turing is the perfect figure to weave many of those narratives around. It's good for young people and the general public, and good for the field.

The Turing machine is a key conceptual model for understanding the basics of computation. The Turing Test is a great model for thinking about what being intelligent means. Hardly a week goes by without the term Turing Complete appearing somewhere in a HN comment. The fact that he also played an important role in the design and construction of actual practical computing machines, and did so to fight nazis seals the deal.

Of course there's more to it, there's plenty of credit to go around, but Turing is the perfect entry point for people to appreciate and learn more about all the work that went into the founding of computer science. It elevates the profile of the whole field.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#48

Post by progre »

ajkjk wrote: post #8

I feel like it's really weird to call what Gödel was doing computer science.

I makes sense to me. The "computer science" to "practical computer work" relationship has about the same distance as fundamental physics has to industrial chemistry.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#49

Post by billyruffian »

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.

The work at Bletchly wasn't declassified until the 70s. The house and the site was a near ruin when I visited in the 90s. Hardly a government promoting anyone or anything. There is some, quite rightly, national disgust at the way Turing was treated which probably plays into his myth.

Re: Turing Oversold?

#50

Post by mhh__ »

hutzlibu wrote: post #46
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.

"I think Zuse seems very unsung" Of what I know, this might be, because he worked for the Nazis and his prototypes were mostly destroyed in the war and somewhat forgotten and seemed to have not been influential to the general branch of computing.

Oh sure. I know why, but I find computer engineering a bit more interesting than theory so I'd rather read about him than quite a few others.
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