The deification of Alan Turing
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The deification of Alan Turing
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Re: The deification of Alan Turing
#2Re: The deification of Alan Turing
#3Strangely negative. The ACM award isn't the only reason people celebrate Turing...
Re: The deification of Alan Turing
#4Strangely negative. The ACM award isn't the only reason people celebrate Turing...
I suppose the link missing from the article is von Neumann: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture
That von Neumann may have been heavily influenced by Turing's paper, so that we could say Turing's idea helped.
Re: The deification of Alan Turing
#5No post body was provided.
Re: The deification of Alan Turing
#6This article just goes to show that, when people hear about "computer science", they think that it only refers to actual hardware computers. Case in point, the reference about "many [...] innovations around computer architecture".
Computer science is about the mechanized manipulation of symbols. Turing proposed a fundamental model to reason about this. He wasn't trying to glorify tabulating machines into mathematical ones; rather, he was solving the Entscheidungsproblem, like a lot of other people. In the circle of logicians, philosophers and mathematicians that cared for this issue (the proto-computer scientists, in a sense), he has never been "obscure".
Re: The deification of Alan Turing
#7No post body was provided.
Re: The deification of Alan Turing
#8I've always understood "Father of " to be fluid, and usually there's more than one possible figure. Turing, or Babbage, or Shannon, etc could all be called that. One organization thinks Turing is the father. So?
Who really cares?
Re: The deification of Alan Turing
#9This is... somewhat untethered from reality?
Of course there's a link between mathematics and computing, and it well predates Turing or Berkeley. Starting somewhere with Leibniz' "stepped reckoner", stumbling further along with Babbage, Lovelace, and the many actuarial computers.
And that link was very obvious by the time Hilbert & Ackerman formulated the Entscheidungsproblem. Turings biggest contribution to computing was two-fold:
One, he created a formal (theoretical) machine that had behavior equivalent to first-order logic. Second, he formally proved that equivalence - probably the most important part here. That formally proven equivalence means that all problems decidable by first-order logic are decidable by a machine. Three, he used that to formally prove the Entscheidungsproblem isn't generally solvable, and so proved the limits of first order logic.
That's the fundamental breakthrough. Proving that a machine can solve an entire class of problems, and that there are limits to what that machine can solve.
It's not that he somehow shaped what computers should look like, but that he had formally proven their capabilities and limitations.
I'm not surprised by the article given the background of the author - if you value practicality over theory (i.e. you favor software engineering over computer science), Aiken and Berkeley are more relevant. But the ACM has always cared about a theoretical foundation, and so their admiration of Turing makes sense.
The fact that the author doesn't bother to even acknowledge that distinction is a bit surprising, though.
Re: The deification of Alan Turing
#10This article just goes to show that, when people hear about "computer science", they think that it only refers to actual hardware computers. Case in point, the reference about "many [...] innovations around computer architecture". Computer science is about the mechanized manipulation of symbols. Turing proposed a fundamental model to reason about this. He wasn't trying to glorify tabulating machines into mathematical…
To expand on your point here: there are generally two inroads into computer science from other disciplines. You can view it is an extension of electrical engineering and the actual development of computing hardware, or you can view it as a development of an "applied math" curriculum.
From that viewpoint, the article here is mostly complaining that Turing has had little impact on the development of computer science if you only look at it from the first perspective. Except the ACM in particular generally hews more towards the second perspective--of the ~50 Turing Awards, at best a dozen of them aren't heavily rooted in a view from the second perspective.
In other words, this amounts to a complaint that the organization that honors the people who make contributions to the math-y side of computer science names its award for doing so after the one of the most important math-y contributors of computer science as opposed to one of the people who actually built contributors.