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Turing Oversold?

• bobthechef 5y ago
  I wonder how much of this is due to anglocentrism. Wouldn’t be the first time.
• jgrahamc 5y ago
  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 earlier foundational work by Polish mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski who were the first to break the Enigma code (none of them were even mentioned in the movie). Some say this was decisive for defeating the Third Reich. Yes, Turing worked on Enigma and the Bombe to automate breaking of the code. However, Colossus wasn't for Engima (it was for Tunny) and Turing didn't work on it. This paragraph seems confused about which is which. Also, the fact that the Polish who did the original work weren't mentioned in the movie is just one of many things horribly wrong with that movie. It's so bad it shouldn't be considered canon.
  • rincewind 5y ago
    Canon? Isn't Turing being canonised the problem in the first place?
    • RicoElectrico 5y ago
      In a fictional universe a medium (book, movie etc.) being "canon" is the original author's seal of approval claiming "this happened". I think this is a joking extrapolation to the real life, and the "author" here is, in best case real life, or as an approximation, historians' position based on evidence.
      • jgrahamc 5y ago
        Correct. That's what I meant.
  • vmilner 5y ago
    It seems a bit surprising not to mention specifically the harder _naval_ Enigma and the U-boat threat in the context of Turing.
  • ekianjo 5y ago
    > It's so bad it shouldn't be considered canon. Since when are movies supposed to be accurate historical references? They are made to be entertaining, so facts get kicked out of the door from Day 1.
    • mannykannot 5y ago
      It is not like you cannot tell a good story here without embellishing and distorting it. As it happens, Verity Stobb panned the movie (justifiably, IMHO), in her splendidly British style, for much more than just getting the facts wrong. https://www.theregister.com/2015/01/26/verity_stob_turing_movie_script_as_it_should_have_been/ https://www.theregister.com/2015/01/26/verity_stob_turing_mo...
      • ekianjo 5y ago
        > It is not like you cannot tell a good story here without embellishing and distorting it. You can't tell a complex story in a short time and numerous characters on screen. In books you can. In movies it's borderline impossible and therefore simplifying/dumbing things down is a filter you need to apply first.
        • mannykannot 5y ago
          you don't have to make stuff up - that's not simplifying things. And dumbing-down is not equivalent to simplifying, unless you do it in a dumb way. Talented writers take one issue, or one theme, from the big picture and weave a story from that.
          • ekianjo 5y ago
            Please share with me one movie with a complex storyline involving dozens of characters, you know, like in real life, then. I am curious.
            • mannykannot 5y ago
  • cma 5y ago
    > Yes, Turing worked on Enigma and the Bombe Since it wasn't linked, Bombe was based on the Polish Bomba machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)
  • jagrsw 5y ago
    > Polish mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki > and Henryk Zygalski who were the first to break the Enigma > code I was in ~2010 or so in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. There was some exhibition related to Enigma there or maybe Enigma device on display (I don't remember what was it exactly now). The person who toured us around was telling us a brief story of how the Enigma was broken, starting with Bletchley Park. Me or maybe my friend asked who was the first to break Enigma, and he immediately answered that it was Turing, then noticed our puzzled face expressions, and added something along 'ah.. yeah.. and Polish did some minor work too' :). Just an anecdote.
• helsinkiandrew 5y ago
  You can say something similar about a lot of inventions or discoveries that happened in a time when many others were working in the same area. Light bulbs, powered flight, calculus, the EMF laws etc. History seems to like a single origin story.
  • flohofwoe 5y ago
    Not just history and not just inventions (ok, this quote is pretty much history by now too): "There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex. I guess whoever wrote that line didn't even get the irony. https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/11/12/deus-ex-2 https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/11/12/deus-ex-2
• pantulis 5y ago
  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 figure to a similar analysis and come with the same results, it's absurd to try and come up with someone with such an overwhelming figure like Albert Einstein these days. 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.
  • pvg 5y ago
    even Einstein also stood in the shoulders of giants People have had that perched-on-giants feeling for some time: This concept has been traced to the 12th century, attributed to Bernard of Chartres. Its most familiar expression in English is by Isaac Newton in 1675: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...
    • OrderlyTiamat 5y ago
      I've heard this quote explained as an insult directed to one of Newtons enemies (either Leibiz or Hooke), referencing their short height. I'm not convinced it's true, but it is an amusing possibility.
    • agumonkey 5y ago
      Note that this might be a double meaning jab at hook. Sadly brilliant if true
  • hoseja 5y ago
    Because those others mostly aren't anglos helping the war effort.
  • donkeybeer 5y ago
• NtochkaNzvanova 5y ago
  Of course Turing didn't invent computer science. Everyone knows that Jürgen Schmidhuber invented computer science.
• pyentropy 5y ago
  The average person has no clue what theoretical computer science is. But science fields do need marketing. All children have heroes they look up to. Putting focus on Turing's achievements is merely creating a pop star figure in the mainstream, which I think is a good thing: a smart dude works on a problem that saves World War 2 and now powers your phone and your TikTok app. Once you are actually interested in the field you can work out the nuances and the falsehoods in that claim. Evaluating earlier work in some field throughout history always leads to a complex graph of achievements, but you cannot put that graph in the name of an annual prize. Do we change "Turing Award" to "Frege-Cantor-Godel-Church-Turing"?
  • Banana699 5y ago
    >a smart dude works on a problem that saves World War 2 and now powers your phone and your TikTok app. The vast majority of people working anywhere near mathematics, physical sciences or electrical engineering (the 3 founding pillars of CS) in the 1920s and 1930s probably worked on problems related to WW2 during WW2. You can equally state that motivating claim for a lot of other people. I think Turing gets the Media Treatment^TM because there's a lot of Tragic Hero Energy in his story: <A gay man in an era that summarily rejected him [and we tell this story in an era that is extremely oversensitive and hyper-reactive to this particular sort of injustice]; a smart, shy pupil whose closest childhood friend (and suspected lover) died early of a now-extinct illness; a mathematician who dreamed of how numbers and lookup tables could hold a conversation, saw them used and counter-used to destroy cities and murder millions, then was finally rewarded with prison and humiliation by the people he fought for.> Turing himself off course deserves all praise and glory and the righteous anger for how he was treated in his last years, but I think our era's affinity for him is just the old mechanism of people digging the past for battles that reflect the moral values they're currently (fighting for|winning|losing), see also the misguided claim that Ada Lovelace is the first "computer programmer", usually followed by a looong screed about Women In Tech. We just like a good story to exaggerate and make it reflect our current moral memes, and the idea of a Man|Woman Ahead Of Their Times is a catch by this standard.
    • UncleMeat 5y ago
• ajkjk 5y ago
  I feel like it's really weird to call what Gödel was doing computer science.
  • amelius 5y ago
    I feel that computer science is really the wrong word. It's like calling astronomy "telescopy", to paraphrase Dijkstra.
    • jessaustin 5y ago
      "Computation" would have been a more felicitous term for the field, but that ship has probably sailed.
  • stepbeek 5y ago
    Encoding logical statement into numbers is foundational, but I do see your point. I don't know of any evidence that says that Gödel was interested in automating computation through his encoding. That being said, I view Gödel's addition to be so mind-blowing that I can't help but privately think of him as the founder.
  • progre 5y ago
    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.
    • ajkjk 5y ago
      yeah, but what he was doing was much more in the realm of logic and set theory, which is to say mathematics, not concerned with anything to do with computation.
  • jameshart 5y ago
    Right - in Gödel’s mind, he was trying to model how mathematics works - the same applies to the problem Hilbert and co were framing in the Entscheidungsproblem. They were wrestling with the foundational philosophy of how powerful mathematics could ever claim to be. 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’.
• fmajid 5y ago
  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.
  • r_c_a_d 5y ago
    The brits didn't put anyone forward at all, they kept it secret for as long as they could and long after Turing's death. There is now a memorial at Bletchley Park to the Polish mathematicians who worked on Enigma.
    • mhh__ 5y ago
      Indeed, we basically shoved Colossus in a warehouse (scientifically at least - I assume they were used for more cold war stuff)
  • rich_sasha 5y ago
    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.
    • bobthechef 5y ago
      “Little people” seems like a strange choice of words. In this case, these were foundational contributions.
    • ellimilial 5y ago
      The team being 'all-British' for obvious security reasons. Which I imagine might have felt like and insult to an injury to the 'little people', who, despite cracking the code, were not permitted to continue working on it. Making them, you know, 'little people'.
  • 5y ago
• rtpg 5y ago
  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 biggest thing is Turing probably ended up doing good amounts of contributions to the academic/theoretical side and the practical side, but it feels like we are missing opportunities to describe the confluence of so many people's ideas in this period of history to end up at the current "machines that read instructions and then act upon them in a generalized fashion, very quickly". This article seems to be that, and it's super intersting
  • jgrahamc 5y ago
    The Imitation Game was inaccurate and horrible every way you look at it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Historical_inaccuracies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Historical_...
    • formerly_proven 5y ago
      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.
      • goto11 5y ago
        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.
        • HideousKojima 5y ago
• bjornsing 5y ago
  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.
  • skissane 5y ago
    > 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.
    • bjornsing 5y ago
      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”.
      • skissane 5y ago
        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.
      • tsimionescu 5y ago
        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 symbol is read, recognized, how it alters the internal state, how the next symbol is chosen, or even how many symbols you actually need are not mentioned and even considered irrelevant. Turing wasn't building one of these, he was proving that this model captures all known computation, and that even so it is undecidable whether this machine would ever stop for any arbitrary computation.
• codeflo 5y ago
  It seems to be in style now to try to tear down the public perception of past great minds, I recently read a similar article about Hawking. And while this article may have some points, I don't think the overall framing is fair. I think everyone with an interest in theoretical CS should work through Turing's 1936 paper at one point in their life. For me, the important part of that paper is how convincingly it argues that the proposed machine model is not just yet another model of computation, but a complete model of computation: that everything you could reasonably call computation is encompassed by these machines. So there's a finality to Turing's definition of computation: these problems are unsolvable not just with this model, but with any reasonable machine model. It's very hard to make the same case for lambda calculus, which is (in my opinion) a large part of what made Turing's paper so groundbreaking.
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• kryptiskt 5y ago
  Eh, he worked on important problems and made significant contributions. It's a rare case that scientists are actually oversold, and that's mostly a case of the public mistaking excellent popularizers of science for top scientists. It might seem that some gets too much attention, but that is because scientists in general aren't known at all and undeservedly obscure. Pulling down an icon wouldn't help them get any more public recognition, it would just leave the field without any publicly known names, like most areas of science (like, what are the big heroes of solar physics?).
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• mhh__ 5y ago
  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.
  • jgrahamc 5y ago
    Agreed. Zuse did a lot of cool stuff.
  • hutzlibu 5y ago
    "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.
    • mhh__ 5y ago
      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.
    • TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      Von Braun also worked for the Nazis. Interesting to speculate what would have happened if Zuse had been paper-clipped to the US and given a huge budget.
      • schlupa 5y ago
        One funny anecdote about Zuse during the war was that he managed to save his Z4 because it was named as V4 in the paperwork. The wehrmacht officers thought it was one of these retaliation weapon V1, V2, V3 so V4 was very important and got high priority to be hidden away somewhere.
    • adrian_b 5y ago
      There is an indirect influence of Zuse in the daily life of most programmers. The "for" keyword used in the "for" loops comes from Algol 60, which inherited it from its predecessor from 1958, IAL. The "for" loops were introduced in IAL by Heinz Rutishauser, who had used "fuer" loops (i.e. "for" in German) for the first time in 1951, when he had published a paper describing a computer programming language, 3 years before Fortran introduced the "do" loops in 1954. In the Rutishauser paper from 1951, he quotes Zuse with his paper about a programming language (published in 1948) as the inspiration for his own improved programming language, which included the "for" loops.
• netcan 5y ago
  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.
  • simonh 5y ago
    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.
    • roenxi 5y ago
      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 taking today". Narratives are inferior to truth when it comes to making decisions.
• Labo333 5y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Schmidhuber#Views [3]: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/most-cited-neural-nets.html https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/most-cited-neural-nets.html
  • albertzeyer 5y ago
    He just wants to get the facts right, esp the correct attribution to the original scientific contributions (who did it first). Originality is easily defined as who did sth first. This might not be the same as influence of some work. It might be that someone else does a lot of groundbreaking work which actually makes sth work (e.g. Goodfellow et al for GAN). You can say the GAN paper had more influence than Schmidhubers Adversarial Curiosity Principle. Also, of course some newer authors might not know of all the old work. So it might be that people get the same ideas. So when Goodfellow got the idea for GAN, he might not have known about Schmidhubers Adversarial Curiosity. The problem is, sometimes people did know about the other original work but intentionally do not cite them. You can not really know. People of course will tell you they did not know. But this can be fixed by just adding the citation. It looks bad of course when there are signs that they should have known, so it was really intentionally. There is also a lot of arguing when sth is the same idea, or when sth is a different novel idea. This can be ambiguous. But for most cases which are discussed by Schmidhuber, when you look at the core idea, this is actually not so much the case. Also, this is also not so much a problem. There is less argumentation about whether sth is at least related. So this still should be cited then. The question is then, which work should one cite. I would say all the relevant references. Which is definitely the original work, but then also other influential work. Many people just do the latter. And this is one of the criticism by Schmidhuber, that people do not give enough credit (or no credit) to the original work.
• heurisko 5y ago
  I watched the "Imitation Game" and read the biography of Turing by Andrew Hodges. What I found fascinating about the biography was recognising what Turing was describing in theoretical terms, as actual hardware and software concepts today. I know some parts are somewhat obvious, but it was still nice to trace the concepts back to excerpts from his work. The Imitation Game is a nice fiction, but doesn't portray Turing as having very much agency, in comparison to the real Turing. I think the fictional and real-life characters were completely different.
  • jgrahamc 5y ago
    The Imitation Game is awful and should never be screened.
    • mlajtos 5y ago
      It is a good movie. It introduced Turing to the masses in a compassionate way. Also it showed normal people that cryptography, despite being rather boring and mathy, is extremely important in everyday life. I also enjoyed Breaking the Code – https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115749/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115749/
      • arethuza 5y ago
        I would agree that is an enjoyable movie but also terrible history - but then most movies that deal with historical events are wildly inaccurate - usually for fairly understandable reasons. I was lucky enough to see the stage version of Breaking the Code - Derek Jacobi was outstanding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyDe8IWAxaY&t=168s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyDe8IWAxaY&t=168s
• okl 5y ago
  Related books with more depth by Edgar Daylight: - Turing Tales: https://dijkstrascry.com/turingtales https://dijkstrascry.com/turingtales - The Dawn of Software Engineering: https://dijkstrascry.com/dawn https://dijkstrascry.com/dawn
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
  > In 1935, Alonzo Church derived a corollary / extension of Gödel's result by showing that Hilbert & Ackermann's famous Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) does not have a general solution.[CHU] To do this, he used his alternative universal coding language called Untyped Lambda Calculus, which forms the basis of the highly influential programming language LISP. >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).
• timeoperator 5y ago
  Agreed. Steve Jobs invented the first computer.
• mark_l_watson 5y ago
  The author complained loudly that he didn’t get sufficient credit for some of his early work in deep learning. Then he received credit, but keeps touting his early contributions. I know of no one else in the field who spends so much energy on the past, rather than present and future work. To be honest, his trying to bring Allen Turing down a notch me annoys me.
• teknopaul 5y ago
  I smell a rat. There are damn good reasons Turin has been posthumously awarded prizes and accolades. A fact I doubt the author of this article is ignorant of. 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.
• wirthjason 5y ago
  A fascinating book on Turing and Church is “The Annotated Turing”. It’s a walk through of Turings paper with analysis and commentary. It was written by Charles Petzold, who also wrote the immensity popular book “CODE”. https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Turing-Through-Historic-Computability/dp/0470229055 https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Turing-Through-Historic-Com...
  • arduinomancer 5y ago
    +1 It’s pretty easy to understand from an average programmer’s perspective I found the proofs at the end are a bit hard to follow but it’s not really critical to understand them if you just want to know what a Turing Machine is and the history/context behind it I thought it was really interesting how Turing defines what are essentially “macros” for the machine For example copy or erase
• yodelshady 5y ago
  It's certainly true that Turing didn't invent computer science. As a point of order: > A popular British movie [The Imitation Game] even went so far as to say he invented the computer. The Imitation Game that was financed by a US production company, with an American screenwriter and Norwegian director? That British movie?
• tomxor 5y ago
  I started reading "the computer and the brain", derived from the unperformed silliman lectures by John von Neumann. 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.
• amelius 5y ago
  Steve Jobs is also oversold. Same for Elon Musk, etc.
• OhNoMyqueen 5y ago
  He's not oversold. His major feat (breaking enigma using a computer) is miscategorized into Computer Science, where it should be classified into Computer Engineering and Software Engineering, alongside other stars like Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. His second major feat (the Turing Machine model) is one stone among the many foundational stones of Computer Science.
  • adrian_b 5y ago
    Yes, "X oversold" is a poor choice of words for cases like Turing or Einstein. The contributions of people like Turing and Einstein were as important as they are claimed to be, they are not oversold. On the other hand, I am also very annoyed that the majority of people have some idea about the importance of Turing or Einstein, but they are completely unaware that there were many other contemporaneous scientists whose contributions were equally important and neither Turing nor Einstein nor any of their many peers could have created their own original work without using the work of the others. These myths about the singular geniuses are reflected in the stupid laws about the so-called "intellectual property". There exists no new "intellectual property" that does not incorporate 99% of old "intellectual property", but this is not handled correctly in patent claims or in fair use conditions. If the current laws about patents and copyrights would have been applied during the initial evolution of the electronics and computer industries, they would have never progressed to the level of today.
  • iainmerrick 5y ago
    He's not oversold. His major feat (breaking enigma using a computer) You’re overselling him right there. That wasn’t his feat, he was just on the team (and after Enigma had been initially broken).
• jesuslop 5y ago
  An ad fontes breadcrumb elucidation I think that passes through Gödel 1934, in §9 "General recursive functions". "...this leads to the question what one would mean by 'every recursive function'. One may attempt to define this notion as follows...", and remites to footnote 34: "This was suggested by Herbrand in private cummunication". Finally the note points to the article post scriptum where Gödel appraises (later) Turing work as settling what would become known Church's thesis, that Turing machines exhaust all 'mechanical procedures'. "In consequence of later advances, in particular of the fact that, due to A. M. Turing's work, a precise and unquestionably adequate definition of the general concept of formal system [by defining 'mechanical procedure'] can now be given..."
• tiagoleifert 5y ago
  This article is super misleading. He first says that Church was Turing's advisor without citing that Church became Turing's advisor only after both of them independently solved the Entscheidungsproblem. Also, it is only after Turing became aware of Church's solution that he wrote an appendix to his work where he cited Church and showed that both solutions were equivalent. And even through the solutions were equivalent, the techniques employed were very different. Church even stated that Turing machines were more intuitive and praised Turing's work. About Turing citing Gödel, the problems they solved were related but not the same. To put it informally, Gödel showed that in every useful axiomatic system, there would theorems that could neither be proved true or false. To do this, he codified math and derived such theorem. On the other hand, Turing showed that there was no general way of deciding if a theorem was true, false on unprovable. To do this, Turing defined a model of computation that we now call Turing machines. Both Turing and Church defined the first two (and equivalent) models of computation. After this, many new models emerged and none of them were shown to be more powerful (in relation to what it computes) than Turing machines or Lambda Calculus. That is why we now believe in what we call the Church-Turing thesis: Everything that is computable is computable by a Turing machine. I see many people in the comments praising the article because of the number of citations. This is not a good metric to judge one's work. I do not have the time to make a reference to everything that I said above, but if one is curious they can find all of them in Charles Petzold's book The Annotated Turing. If one is interest in this topic, I also recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the book Gödel's Proof. About the rant the article makes about over attributing a person contributions, I can only say that this is a problem that has no solutions. One example I like to give is Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. We say that Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem, which is true, but we may also say that Wiles "only" did the last step in proving Fermat's Last Theorem, before him many other people tried, advanced and contributed to our understanding of the problem so Wiles could finally prove it. For me personally, I know that every advance in science is made in the shoulder of giants and do not bother with attribution, since this is a topic we could discuss all day without going anywhere. About the particular example of Turing, I am Computer Scientist working with Theory of Computation and Computational Complexity who is familiar with the history and pioneer work done by Turing and do not believe he is oversold, not in the academic community nor in popular culture.
• motohagiography 5y ago
  Nice to acknowledge the work of lesser known lights, but the article kind of reduces to another variation of, "your co-ordinates for belief and identity are arbitrary and unstable, the protagonists of the story you tell yourself are villains, it's probably because you are a shameful example of a person and should expect punishment, but you can redeem yourself by renouncing belief and aligning to the narrative of progress in the present." It passes the popular bar for new knowledge because it illustrates a conflict and resolves it, but it's in a cognitive style that seems to conflate debasing knowledge with discovering it. It is how people are educated these days, where it is sufficient to destabilize and neutralize target ideas instead of augmenting or improving them, so it's no surprise, but the article seemed like a good example to articulate what is irritating about this trend in educated thinking.
• ogogmad 5y ago
  I need to find a reference for this: Goedel apparently believed that it was impossible to explicitly enumerate all the partial computable functions over the integers, until Turing proved him wrong. He reasoned as follows: - You can't enumerate the total functions because Cantor's diagonal argument is constructive. Given a claimed enumeration of N^N, you can perform Cantor's diagonal construction to produce a computable element of N^N not in the enumeration. So N^N is computably uncountable. - Classical set theory says that a superset of an uncountable set is also uncountable. The problem is that while a superset of an uncountable set is uncountable, a superset of a computably uncountable set may instead be computably countable. The partial functions over the integers show that this is indeed the case. Cantor's construction is blocked because a partial function can output a degenerate value called non-termination. A computable function must map the non-termination value to itself. Since it isn't mapped to something different, Cantor's construction can't produce something outside an enumeration.
  • codeflo 5y ago
    I think the more widespread term for what you call "computably countable" is "computably enumerable", perhaps in part to make the distinction more clear. For example, the set of all natural numbers is (trivially) c.e., but has many non-c.e. subsets. But to understand this is understanding the Entscheidungsproblem, so it shouldn't be surprising that this was less clear before that was resolved.
    • ogogmad 5y ago
      Computably countable is also a correct term. In line with this approach to computability theory: http://math.andrej.com/asset/data/synthetic-slides.pdf http://math.andrej.com/asset/data/synthetic-slides.pdf It shows that the unsolvability of the halting problem follows from: - The computable uncountability of N^N, which can be proved using an identical argument to the one Cantor used to prove the set-theoretic uncountability of N^N. - The computable countability of the partial maps from N to N. If the halting problem were solvable, then the second bullet point would contradict the first. So it's essentially a weird twist on set theory that uses constructive logic.
• bo1024 5y ago
  We've been over this. Gödel's mu-recursive functions were a poor model of computation because it's completely unclear how to physically implement the arbitrary-function minimization operator. So people didn't see how to build a machine that calculates this way. Similarly, there's no clear way how to mechanize lambda calculus. Turing Machines, on the other hand, were instantly obviously mechanizable. It was clear that one could build a physical machine to run any Turing program without human input. By proving that they could simulate the other systems, Turing showed that those other systems could be mechanizable as well. I don't understand why Schmidhuber continues to ignore this crucial point.
  • KingOfCoders 5y ago
    "For example, it was claimed that Turing founded computer science.[...] Turing's 1936 paper provided the "theoretical backbone" for all computers to come." So your argument is, because it is unclear how to "physically implement the arbitrary-function minimization operator", Turing is the better "theoretical backbone" and has founded computer science?
    • 3pt14159 5y ago
      Not OP, but I agree with them. The word computer means multiple things. In one sense it the abstraction of universal computation. Imagine a world where actual physical computers didn't progress to universal computation, but were stuck being purpose built to the present day. The field of computer science would be utterly different because they couldn't actually compute anything with their science. They could just discuss computability in an abstract sense. It'd be like physics without the particle colliders or telescopes or lasers. I think of the founders of computer science more like the founding fathers of America, rather than a single guy named Turing, but some are more memorable than others.
      • KingOfCoders 5y ago
        The article writes about your point of general computation and purpose built computers: "Likewise, Konrad Zuse never got a Turing award despite having created the world's first working programmable general computer 1935-41. [...] It was pointed out that none of the computers built during the 1940s were influenced in any way by Turing's 1936 theoretical paper, [...]"
• KingOfCoders 5y ago
  "especially in the Anglosphere". Just like the Wright brothers. And on and on and on. It pays off if you control culture.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• umutisik 5y ago
  Being the first one to claim a formal proof to a theorem is not the most important thing. What's really important is to prove things that improve our understanding, which both Goedel and Turing have done, in the fields of logic and computing respectively.
• liorben-david 5y ago
  Name me a single mathematician - or honestly a single scientist or thinker ever that didn't stand on the shuolders of giant
• jmartrican 5y ago
  Honest question here, how much of the CS theories play a role in the history of the practical computers we use today? For example, if we play back the history of the the modern computers that we use from a perspective of the CPU (with its instruction set), RAM, disk, high level languages, and operating systems... do they have a foundation in CS theories? Or do these constructs come from a more practical engineering basis, void of theory?
  • jecel 5y ago
    Many theories were developed after the practical implementations. It is really hard to separate the two. Relational databases, for example, is a case where the theory came first. But would have that been created without the experience of using hierarchical databases?
• blazespin 5y ago
  The article is an immature and childish distraction from a potentially interesting discussion (where do good ideas come from). There is no such thing as The father of anything. That's just one of the many incarnations of the insipid fantasy society has that "Daddy" will solve all your problems. Turing is absolutely a father of computer science, and his contributions are interesting. This can be said for any scientist, historically speaking. Even Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants. Giving this article oxygen is a colossal waste of time. Just because someone somewhere said some stupid thing isn't a reason to write a 10,000 word essay on it with endless citations. Kinda like what we are doing now..
• qwerty456127 5y ago
  All politicians and state officers should be required to pass the Turing test.
• tegeek 5y ago
  If you take away all the media hype around Alan Turning and just see his contributions, he will still stand out. On Computable Numbers [1] is perhaps one of the top 3 papers in the history of Mathematics. One of the most remarkable thing about Turning Machine is its simplicity. Then again, in 1950, Can Machine Think[2] is perhaps the top 3 papers in the history of Philosophy. And then again, one of the most remarkable thing about Turing Test and the Imitation Game is its simplicity. The impact of these two papers in the academia, industry and in our lives is huge. Alan Turning is easily one of the top 3 Mathematicians and Philosophers of all time. [1]. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf [2]. https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238 https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238
  • wheaties 5y ago
    Mathematicians? No. Computer Science? Yes. If you want to group to math, you're going to have to compete with the likes of Euclid, Reiman, Bayes, Newton, Gauss, Cantor, Erdos, Fermat, Pascal, Leibniz, Bernoulli, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Fourier, Cauchy, Jacobi, Hamilton, Galois, Weierstrass, Cayley, Dedekind, Klein, Hilbert, Brouwer, Godel...
• jmull 5y ago
  Well, this article certainly shoots itself right in the foot. If the problem is that some important early contributions to CS are being overlooked, the solution is to promote those contributions. By framing this as Turing vs. others, the focus is squarely on Turning and his contributions. It puts itself in the position of having to beat down and minimize Turing’s contributions before raising up other contributions. Pretty much setting itself up to fail to convince very many. Instead, e.g., present the narrative of those early contributions, showing how they provided the foundation Turing worked from. (edit: I should add: I understand perfectly that the point of this article probably isn’t to actually convince anyone of anything, but is just a hot take meant to get people worked up for the page views. So mission accomplished, from that perspective, I guess.)
• mannykannot 5y ago
  Alan Turing’s life and work presents an interesting case which makes him rather different than most of the heroes of the ‘great men’ meme. His halting theorem and work on computability is too abstract and abstruse for most people to recognize its significance (at least until and unless they put their minds to understanding it), but his work in defeating the Nazis, and his important subsequent suicide, apparently brought on by what we now regard (rightly) as harmful bigotry, are the essence of drama. His is a modern Campbellian hero’s tale begging to be told. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Fac...
• bodge5000 5y ago
  The problem with technically correct allocation of of credit is that to be truly technically correct, it gets very messy very quickly, as all knowledge is built on other knowledge. The credit for founding computer science would be "[absolutely massive list of people] and finally of course, the one we call Ung, who discovered the wheel". That might seem pedantic and it is, but you need to define exactly where the line is drawn and more so, give a good reason why. In fact its not even that simple, WE need to decide and agree on where the line is drawn and all of us agree why. Otherwise one mans pedantic is anothers important creditation. Obviously that's not going to happen anytime soon, so for now, figureheads like Einstein and Turing do the job. And they do certainly deserve credit to some degree. That or we stop giving credit completely, which a). seems like a good way to destroy knowledge and b). isn't going to happen anytime soon. Edit: As another commenter pointed out, if Einstein or the like were born somewhere else and lived around a different group of people, theres a chance he wouldn't become a figurehead, or he would make less or more or different discoveries. Therefore, theres a third option for creditation, in which everyone who has ever lived up until those discoveries has equal credit. If I were 60 or so years older, I'd be as much to credit for the turing machine as Turing himself. So would you. Of course, this is pretty much as good as no credit to anyone at all, but fixing it again requires a joint agreement on where the line is drawn
  • mbostleman 5y ago
    Agreed. The mainstream needs a single or at least smaller list of heroes that represent a larger effort. Turing is especially suited for this given the oppression he suffered for his sexual orientation combined with the impact of lives saved in WWII as a result of his work.
  • 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    Those aren’t the only options. We can give credit without creating mythic heros. Giving technically correct precise allocation of credit is messy, you’re right. But so is defining what ‘tall’ means, so the precision is beside the point. You don’t need to define exactly where the line is drawn. It reminds me of voting systems, but maybe that’s just because of the election yesterday. If you want to give singular nontransferrable credit, the things you say are important because giving someone credit takes it away from someone else. Division and fighting become the right answers. But if you spread the credit around, saying Leibniz and Newton both get calculus credit (and probably not just those two!), then discussions of which one should get the title of The One And Only Calculus Hero just seems absurd.
• bee_rider 5y ago
  I guess to some extent I can understand some defensiveness of Leibniz, given that he probably deserves a ton of the credit we normally give Newton (and there was actually some bad blood between the two). But Gödel is incredibly famous, isn't he? I don't see why there's a need to give him more credit. Also it is weird that this article doesn't have a couple paragraphs on Von Neumann, he's underappreciated and also very cool.
• kazinator 5y ago
  I feel that this article wastes effort on attacking a bit of a strawman. In the fields of computing and mathematics, nobody (hopefully) believes bunk like that Turing started computer science or invented the first computer. My reactions to all that were, "what? who thinks that, and why don't they check the Wikipedia?" If such beliefs are circulating among laypeople, it is good to debunk them. But doing so in this article (especially while failing to acknowledge that they are strictly lay myths that no mathematician or computer scientist believes) detracts its main thesis, which is about the excessive attribution to particular individuals, while others are ignored/forgotten. Turing is not excessively attributed with anything in our field. He's frequently referenced, mainly because he articulated a concrete model of computation which can be simulated and using which proofs can be made about computability. I mean, academia doesn't habitually make up lies about who did what, especially if they are not coming from that person or persons. I.e. if you don't misrepresent your work yourself, the field is generally not going to step in and do that for you. Embellishing the exploits and contributions of some eminent persona may be what some careless journalists or bloggers sometimes do, but that's neither here nor there.
• ocschwar 5y ago
  No. What Turing did in 1937 might not have been an advance over what Godel and Church did. But if you want to make the case for building a general purpose computer out of mechanical relays or vacuum tubes in 1946, you need a semantic advance. Turing machines did that. Nobody would read Godel and say "let's build ENIAC." Tommy Flowers did read Turing and say that. THAT is the difference. It's like Einstein versus Lorenz. Same mathematics.Different semantic interpretation.
• TimTheTinker 5y ago
  This article gives far too little credit to John von Neumann (not to mention Turing).
• 0x456 5y ago
  There is also the related "Matthew effect" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect#Sociology_of_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect#Sociology_of_sc...
• ur-whale 5y ago
  Jürgen Schmidhuber forging on in his never-ending quest to slay historical misattributions and generally right all wrongs. We can count ourselves lucky this time: at least, the topic isn't himself. On a positive note, he can't be accused of being inconsistent.
• Animats 5y ago
  This has changed over time. In early computing, the people mentioned were Eckert and Mauchley, who designed the ENIAC, and von Neumann, who figured out how a practical CPU should be organized. Also Shannon, who figured out that relays basically did Boolean algebra and could be analyzed formally. Bletchley Park work was still classified in those days, so not much was known about that. Much to the annoyance of Tony Flowers, who built the Colossus code-breaking machine but couldn't mention it in post-war job-hunting. (Incidentally, Colossus was not a general-purpose computer. It was a key-tester, like a Bitcoin miner ASIC.) As I've pointed out before, the big problem was memory. IBM had electronic addition and multiplication, with tubes, in test before WWII. But the memory situation was really bad. Two tubes per bit. Or electromagnetic relays. Or electromechanical counter wheels, IBM's mainstay in the tabulator era. To store N bits, you had to build at least N somethings. Babbage's Analytical Engine called for a memory of a ring of rows of counter wheels, a mechanism the size of a locomotive. Access time would have been seconds. Much of early computing was about kludges to get some kind of memory. The "Manchester Baby" had a CRT-based memory, the Williams tube. That was the first computer to actually run a program stored in memory. Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Geoff Tootill, 1948. After that, everybody got in on the act. Mercury tanks and long metal rods were built. Really slow, and the whole memory has to go past for each read, so twice the memory means twice the access time. Then there were magnetic drum machines. Magnetic tape. Finally, magnetic cores. At last, random access, but a million dollars a megabyte as late as 1970. Memory was a choice between really expensive and really slow well into the 1980s. Turing was involved with one of the early machines, Pilot ACE/ACE. But he quit before it was finished.
• simorley 5y ago
  If hollywood made a movie about it, then it most likely is oversold. > especially in the Anglosphere. What does he expect. We've always done this. Whether it is with thomas edison, the wright brothers, etc. Each nation/ethnic group oversells their achievements and minimizes others. We also did that in terms of gender/race. Women and minorities have been undersold. The germans do the same thing. Gutenberg didn't invent the movable type. It existed in china, korea, etc for centuries before gutenburg. It's human nature. All nations/groups do this. Imagine how native americans feel when we tell them columbus discovered the americas. Everything the author wrote appears valid though. Turing didn't invent the computer. He didn't create computer science. He didn't win ww2. What he did is solve Hilbert's Decision Problem ( which church did before turing ) in a very interesting manner. With or without Turing, we'd still have computers, we'd still have computer science and we'd still have won ww2. But sadly, the masses need heroes and heroes are created/manufactured by their advocates. Turing for a variety of reasons has more advocates than church, godel, etc. And unfortunately for the writer, it's an anglo world and our message will be the loudest and most visible. The author states the truth but he is a lone voice in the wilderness. A few thousand will probably read his factual article while millions will watch the misleading "The Imitation Game" and read the misleading articles from the media. It must be frustating for the author, but truth is at a disadvantage to fiction here.
• jopsen 5y ago
  It's not necessarily about being the first to discover a result. It's about being able to communicate it clearly. Being concise and presenting relatable models is important. Results have limited value on their own. If they are not clear and concise you can't reach a wide audience.
• titzer 5y ago
  FTA: > They did not exploit this—Turing used his (quite inefficient) model only to rephrase the results of Gödel and Church on the limits of computability. That's an infuriating sentence, as the author clearly has no clue how insanely inefficient Church numerals are. For those who don't know, Church numerals are literally a unary encoding of integers as repeatedly applied functions. I read a lot of this article and at no point was I nodding along, but at this point I just had to pause and vent. This person has something against Turing to the point that it's just weird.
• amw-zero 5y ago
  This did not convince me that Turing's accomplishments are exaggerated. Anyone who knows computing history knows that there are many people involved. But Turing's contributions are not overstated, they are just accurate. That doesn't mean that he was the only computer scientist in the world.
• rg111 5y ago
  Also see this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27536974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27536974 It's almost like Schmidhuber hates Turing and wants the world to worship Godel. It's personal for him. He also wrote a tweet and maybe another post where he ranked up all countries of Europe and says that Europeans collectively got the most medals in Olympics and hence they are superior. He suffers from this weird and serious case of European Supremacy. I know about his actual works (not what he claims to have done). And based on that I respect him. He also has got a cult of people following him and who will gang up on any dissenters, i.e. people not thinking of him as a walking god. Schmidhuber has actual contributions, I know. Now he moved to a country with extremely bad record of human rights, and has policies and implementation that put the Taliban to shame. Now he is promoting the institution left and right any opportunity he gets. He is very hard to take seriously.
• exporectomy 5y ago
  He seems a bit self-contradictory saying both "value those who ensure that science is self-correcting." and "when it comes to credit assignment in science, the important question is: Who did it first?" Probably worth stepping back and asking why we have heroes in the first place. It obviously doesn't serve the hero himself because he's dead. It's for the benefit of other people. Perhaps if it seems unfair, people won't be so inspired by them, but that's more about perception and modern culture than reality. We already have a million and one scientists trying to be the first to discover a novel phenomenon but in a useless and non-self-correcting way and not even bothering to follow up on their own "discovery", perhaps hoping someone else will do the hard work while they enjoy the credit of being first. I'd also say that perhaps it doesn't count if you do it first but your results remain hidden and unused. I'll bet some native African discovered Angel Falls before Angel did, but that knowledge didn't get out to the wider world so what was the point of it?