Turing Oversold?

Turing I think resonates as a computer scientist more than a mathematician for the same reason that Ada Lovelace does: both of them shared, and made explicit in how they approached problems, the insight of the generalizability of computability beyond mathematics. Where Babbage saw a calculating machine spitting out numerical tables, Lovelace saw music and pictures. And not in the implicit reductive way most mathematicians assume that anything important can be modeled as mathematics: because if it can’t be modeled mathematically, it can’t be important. Turing and Lovelace both seemed to get that this is a mathematics that can act on anything, and that that’s what makes the mathematics interesting.

The extension beyond ‘and this lets you derive any provable true statement within a formal system in finite time’ to ‘and this lets you carry out any deterministic transformation on an arbitrary piece of text’ to something like ‘if machine translation is possible this machine can do it’ or ‘a sufficiently sophisticated machine like this could hold a convincingly human conversation’ is a through-line you can only make with Turing’s insights, not just Church or Gödel’s.

And sure, you need Shannon to give you a framework for information representation that extends it to any form of data and dozens of other contributions of course, and without the mathematical foundations of Church and Gödel et al there’s no foundation to build it on at all. But Turing’s bridge out of the mathematical philosophy world into the realm of stuff engineers like Zuse were building seems like as good a moment as any to draw a line and say ‘this is computer science’.

The foreword of this small book is almost as large as the main content and does an excellent job of contextualising it in terms of more recognisable modern technology; but also in terms of the contributions, the cyclical relationship between contributors to the field (Chruch, Turing, von Neumann) and how they inspired and fed off each other. Admittedly the writer has bias towards von Neumanns contributions, yet it is still clear that although he was clearly an incredibly smart, inventive and forward thinking individual ahead of his time - the parts that happened to landed on his lap were a product of collaboration between many brilliant people.

On the contrary, I think this is one of the advantages of Turing’s model: I can imagine standing there in my garage looking on as my universal Turing machine is running low on tape on the left side, and then simply attaching a new roll of fresh empty tape at the end, holding it as it is fed into the machine. :)

It’s simply the least leaky abstraction of computation.

“While Zuse never became a member of the Nazi Party, he is not known to have expressed any doubts or qualms about working for the Nazi war effort.”