61–70 of 311 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 think…
We also shouldn't underestimate the importance of truth. Dealing with the world as-it-is has better results than interacting with a story we'd like to be true but isn't. People waste their lives in service of causes and ideas that just are not grounded in reality. Not just in the philosophical sense that we cannot know truth, but in the practical sense of "the outcome you want will not flow from the actions you are t…
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) This is a misunderstanding of the Turing machine model. The Turing machine is not designed to be a realistically implementable physical machine, and indeed there are no details in Turing's paper on how such a physical machine could be achieved. Instead, the Turing machine model is designed to be a mechanistic model of…
I’ve read the paper. I think we just take different things from it, possibly because you have a background in mathematics?
To me, the main takeaway (if I imagine reading it in 1936) is that a universal Turing machine is not all that complicated, and arouses the “I could build this thing”-intuition.
That of course doesn’t mean that Turing intended it to be realizable, that’s not my point. But he appeals to an engineer’s intuition. It’s that intuitive link that’s valuable and unique IMHO.
BTW, I think your takeaway is probably clearer in Gödel’s work.
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
>In 1936, Alan Turing introduced yet another universal model which has become perhaps the most well-known of them all (at least in computer science): the Turing Machine.[TUR]
Seems like even then, people embraced the imperative model(Turing) over the functional model (Church).
It's makes a lot of sense that kids of the next generation grow up with Alan Turin and Ada Lovelace as the heros of the computer revolution.
Naturally many other people (perhaps you too one day) have made contributions to the world's collective computer knowledge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Turing machine is definitely not some machine that you could build in your garage. None of the mechanisms are specified or even specifiable. The important part, to Turing ateast, is that it perfectly matches what a human does while computing a number, and that there are no magical steps like 'thinking'. Read symbol, change internal state, write other symbol down, rinse and repeat. All of the details of how a symb…
But any individual Turing machine is. Building a simple one is not very hard, and you can imagine supplying it with more and more tape as it needs it.
It’s thus the only model of computation that I can fully imagine “working”. And that to me is the beauty of Turing’s contribution.
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…
> But if you need to choose a Founding Father of Computing Science for the general public, I'd say Alan Turing is the best candidate. Scholars will give due credit to Church, Zuse, von Neumann and all the others. I agree with this. It's certainly the case that I wish more people knew of Alonso Church and Kurt Gödel, but you have to realize in a "PR" sense that it's simply not going to be feasible to teach the general…
He applied computational thinking all over the place, showing great foresight in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern