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.
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.
> 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.
Midway was an example of of a movie where the director and writer were concerned about historical accuracy, and so avoided the sort of risible nonsense that Stobb lampooned in the imitation Game. I am now curious as to whether you will respond in the way that I expect.
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Move Newton, Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein 10kms away from where they were born, surround them by a different set of chimps and the story doesnt end the same way.
A good book from Niall Ferguson - the Sqaure and the Tower - makes the case tradionally Historians have studied individuals instead of groups because its easier to collect data on one chimp versus the entire troupe.
The idea that history is wrong to focus on "chaps" derives from marxism; and Fergusson is very much anti-marxist. The marxian view would be that historical change is the result of economic forces; that if (e.g.) Turing hadn't done it someone else would have, because economics was driving history in that direction.
I'm sympathetic to the marxian view of Great Men; I think it's no coincidence that the related work of Godel and Turing was published within a couple of decades of one-another, or that the ideas of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo emerged around the same time as one-another.
I'm certainly impressed by the greatness of Great Men; but I'm hard-pressed to find one whose discoveries were so remarkable, in the context of their times, that noone else could have been expected to make similar discoveries around the same time.
Alternative angle: among their insights and discoveries, the successes will be shaped by survivorship bias. When deciding what part of one's work to focus on, a person will pursue the things that are close enough to other contemporary work at the time, because it provides a short path to buy-in.
Turing was interested in a bunch of other stuff, but what people know about is the Computer and his war work (at Bletchley Park). His work on say Morphogenesis (why are zebra stripes different on each animal?) is little known.
But Turing probably isn't more important to how you get from the Treaty of Bern in 1874 (creating the UPU thus you could now practically write letters in Paris and send them to New York and it Just Works™ albeit it's expensive and slow) to the Internet than, say, Godel (more fundamental observations about the nature of mathematics that underpin computation) or Grace Hopper (the first compiler although today we'd say this is only a linker). Her Navy bosses couldn't immediately see any value for it. But Grace is apparently the first to make use of the meta-applicability of computing - the minutiae of actually programming the computer are tiresome, a lot of rote tasks perfectly suited to a machine, so, why not have the computer do those parts for you?
Yup, the influences on e.g. Newton happening to delve into reading up on Archimedes, Descartes, Fermat, and then synthesizing their inventions in his mind with lot of time on his hand, or for that matter Leibniz getting math tutoring from Christiaan Huygens seem to be crucial in relation to the invention of fluxions/infinitesimals. (Approximately from memory of reading Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz).
Having lived both 10kms north and 10kms south of Newton's birthplace (in more flat Lincolnshire farmland) I'm not sure he's the best example for that argument!
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
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 that nothing is as simple. For example for physics, "Physics for Poets" by Robert H. March is an eye opener.
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.
> 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 public about their contributions.
And Turing's contributions were genuinely ground-breaking, there's a reason that computer science is lousy with concepts named after or by him (Turing machines, Turing-completeness, even the word "computing" was arguably coined in "On Computable Numbers"). He also thought deeply and hard about the philosophical implications to computing in a way that others didn't (the "Turing test" being the obvious example).
In addition: when a mathematically inclined person describes any kind of mathematical concept to laymen, the first question is always "Yeah, but what is that actually useful for?", asked with a certain amount of disdain. With Turing, the answer is powerful: "How about defeating the Nazis and laying the foundation for modern society?". That case is harder to make for Church or Gödel: they obviously didn't work for the GCSE, and "lambda calculus" as a concept is a much more abstract thing than Turing machines, which laymen can readily understand (i.e. it's "just" a computer).
Add to that the fact that Turing's story is not just about computing, or code-breaking, it's also the story of the suffering that society inflicted on gay men. The fact that he was shamed into suicide is just all the more reason to celebrate him now.
I agree with the basic point of the article, but I have no issue with giving Alan Turing this title. He earned it.
> The fact that he was shamed into suicide is just all the more reason to celebrate him now.
Please don’t diminish his legacy by repeating this lie.
Turings suicide is contentious and circumstantial at best. His documented behaviour had none of the very common signs of suicide - there was no note, he had plans for later in the week, and none of his close friends noted any change in behaviour.
Suicide or not, his treatment by society was equally heinous and repulsive. Even he had lived a complete and happy life, his story would have been a bright example of the terror and evil of homophobia.
Tangential, but one thing I learned from dense computer history book The Dream Machine is that the term "von Neumann architecture" is improperly assigning credit:
von Neumann simply described the work of Eckert and Mauchly on the ENIAC in a written report. And his name was on the report which made people think that he came up with the idea, which was false. It also resulted in a patent dispute -- it's interesting to imagine what would have happened if the concept had been patented. The book goes into detail on this.
The wikipedia article also talks about Turing machines as a precedent that store data and code in the same place. But ironically I'd say that probably gives him too much credit! I think a large share should go to the people who designed a working machine, because it's easy to say come up with the idea of an airplane; much harder to make it work :) And to me it seems unlikely that the Turing Machine, which was an idea created to prove mathematical facts, was a major inspiration for the design of the ENIAC.
Finally, even though the author of this web page has his own credit dispute, I appreciate this elaboration on the credit assigned to Turing.
> von Neumann simply described the work of Eckert and Mauchly on the ENIAC in a written report.
Actually, it was a study group to come up with the successor to ENIAC (called EDVAC) which included Eckert, Mauchly, von Neumann, Goldstine and Burks. Von Neumann was the last to join, but wrote down the group's conclusions in a memo meant for the group. Herman Goldstine typed that up into a nice report but listed von Neumann as the sole author and distributed 24 copies to researchers. Many new copies of the report were made and circulated causing confusion about who had created the ideas.
George Dyson's "Turing's Cathedral", on the other hand, argues that von Neumann's close relationship with Gödel had a major role in getting the stored program idea adopted by the EDVAC group.
The problem is that the general public thinks the CS == Computers.
So, Founding Fathers of computing science becomes mixed - starting from those low brow thinkers we call journalists - with the idea of Founding Father of computing. And this is not only unfair, but technically wrong.
Nobody exists in a vacuum, but I think Kuhn was right: scientific progress is made up of long periods of incremental work split between short bursts of paradigm shifts. Those shifts are more likely to rest on a few very influential people who take the current state and look at it in a considerably different way. We haven’t had that in physics in quite a long time and might not again.
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"?
>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.
Jailing or sterilizing gay people for having sex is evil. End of story. It has only been 20 years since this was the law in some US states. I see no reason why vigorous rejection of this sort of policy as monstrous can possibly be seen as "oversensitive and hyper-reactive".
The point isn't that this oversensitivity is misplaced, the point is that it's moral outrage porn that the tellers of the story use in a smart way to get a reaction from you.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing if it's just one or two story among others, after all the purpose of art is to get strong reactions out of its audience. But when every such story has to lean hard into the moral aspect to the exclusion of all else it becomes a trite children story told for nothing else but feel-good points.
Consider the amount of articles on trump during his presidency. How much of it was high-quality investigative journalism telling you things you don't know, and how much was "Trump tweeted something shockingly stupid, here are a list of experts you don't need telling you this is shockingly stupid, this means End Of Democracy (EOD)" ? The latter articles are technically true, but it's trite and accomplishes nothing but pulling on your memetic levers to get you to like/share/feel-bad|good-all-day.
Also, this is a confusing mess anyway. Turing worked on the Bombe, but that's not a computer at all. Bletchley has one you can see in operation. It's a very complicated machine, but today a child looking at it can't help but wonder if this wouldn't be much easier for a computer.
The Bombe helps break Enigma, and thus is an early part of Ultra and arguably does "save World War 2" but it has no more relevance to your phone or your TikTok app than does the Rubik's cube or the slide rule.
Colossus isn't very far from the Bombe today, you might likely visit both on the same trip, but Turing didn't build it, and although it's clearly in some sense a computer, it is critically lacking in some features you'd want from a general purpose computer since it had a single purpose, to break Tunny in the mid 1940s.
In some sense Colossus is relevant to your phone and TikTok, because it is a computer, but, Turing didn't work on it and it isn't their direct ancestor by any means at all.
After reading that I sat here for a minute and racked my brain as to who my childhood 'hero' might be. I can't remember a single person.
It's amusing to me how much of intellectual work deals in a currency of status. Getting/giving credit for things appears to be the Prime Directive, at least among the observers. We've now graduated to not only stressing who is responsible but what demographic groups they are a part of.
Now, it could be that the real deal groundbreaking folks don't give a damn. Tip o' the hat to those people.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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
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.
Gettysburg and its prequel (Gods and Generals). The dialogue and character motivations may or may not be accurate, but the battles it depicts are pretty accurate.
When I visited Bletchley Park a few years ago, I got into a conversation with one of the docents about the film and it was clear that they had a very low opinion of it there. Turing deserved a better film.
I knew some of the real history beforehand and the movie really annoyed me, so I’m glad to hear you were able to uncover the facts yourself and had a similar reaction!
Among so much that’s just plain wrong, I really dislike the insidious idea that Turing’s horrible punishment at the hands of the state was wrong because he was a unique genius and war hero. No, it was wrong because he was a human being and being gay should not be a crime!
That line of thought makes it harder to argue that no, Turing may have been a genius but wasn’t unique, he was just a significant player in a rich field. That doesn’t make him any less interesting.
> I really dislike the insidious idea that Turing’s horrible punishment at the hands of the state was wrong because he was a unique genius and war hero. No, it was wrong because he was a human being and being gay should not be a crime!
100% agree, an unfortunate mentality all too present in society, where we tend to build narratives of feeling bad for people because are exceptional, and not because they are people
See the classic kids story of “oh the store tried to kick the hobo out but actually he was a millionaire!!!” How about treating all people like human beings even if they aren’t like… valuable to you
I think the attraction to the Turing story is that it is a classical tragedy. If what happened to him happened to any gay man, it would be wrong. But since it happened to one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century, who may have had other breakthroughs that could have pushed mankind forward, it is a tragedy. A tragedy for all mankind. Mankind suffered a huge loss due to its own moral failures.
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.
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 “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.
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.
But that's the opposite direction from Turing's intention. The point of the Turing machine model is for the machine to be both mechanically plausible (no magic required) but also equivalent to what a human does when performing computation.
The Turing machine model is a mechanically plausible abstraction of a human performing a computation by following some steps in their mind and with a notebook. The tape stands in for the notebook. The read head stands in for the human's eyes. The write head stands in for their pencil hand. The internal state of the machine stands in for their mental state. At every step, you either read a symbol from the notebook tape and change your mental state in relation to this symbol, or write a symbol based on the current mental state. The procedure itself can be written on the tape, and you can occasionally refer back to it.
The original paper spends a good few pages working out this metaphor and showing that the machine model perfectly abstracts the mathematician's work of computation.
In the days where you can buy a ram chip, a register machine is a really easy abstraction.
If you're trying to imagine something you can mechanically assemble out of discrete compoonents, it's not so great. You need an unlimited number of components hooked up in complicated ways.
A turing machine is a fixed-size and relatively simple box, plus a long tape that feeds through.
Back to undergraduate days > a decade ago, I think I learnt both lambda calculus and Turing machine at the same class: Formal Language and Automata Theory.
Of course Turing machine is more easy to understand because... it's a theoritical machine, after all. On the other side, lambda calculus was weirder, I didn't get it until learning Haskell :D
It can never be “proven” because the notion of “any computation” being referred to is informal.
Also, it can’t perform any computation, if we say hypercomputation is a form of computation. Hypercomputation is (as far as we know) physically impossible, but so strictly speaking are Turing machines - a true Turing machine has unlimited storage, and an unlimited amount of time in which to complete its computations - any Turing machine you could physically construct would only be a finite approximation of a real one.
> 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 what a mathematician does (in rote day-to-day tasks at least). The tape is a representation of the notebook where the mathematician writes down notes. The read head is a representation of the mathematician reading from the notebook.
It's fascinating to read the paper because of this, since it spends quite a few paragraphs showing that this simplification doesn't lose anything of the mathematician's work. It spends some time noting that even though paper is two-dimensional, it can be losslessly compressed on unidimensional tape. It spends time noting that writing/reading one symbol at a time is a good enough approximation for human writing/reading. It spends time noting that the next step doesn't need to depend on more than the current symbol + internal state, as human attention is also focused on a limited number of symbols.
This is actually why Turing's paper is so convincing on the argument of universal computation - not because the machine is realizable, but because it's hard to invent anything that a mathematician does while calculating that is not captured by the Turing machine model.
I very much recommend reading the first part of the paper [0] to see this argument (the second part, where it is proven that this abstract machine can in fact compute all known numbers, is more technical and flew over my own head).
> 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.
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.
The Turing machine has a tape of unbounded size so can’t be built simpliciter.
Moreover although it turns out that that model of computation is very robust and sufficient for all purposes in physics (unless black holes or something allow hypercomputation) Turing does not really definitively show that and in a way that can’t be definitively shown. All we have is a lack of counterexamples (admittedly a very convincing one.)
I don’t see why this intuition is that helpful generally either; Turing machines don't really help at an implementation level with modern engineering problems as far as I can tell. Most of the time you know that what you want to do is possible in finite time &c.—presumably the difficulty is doing what you want to do, and going via the Turing formalism would be a bit odd.
> The Turing machine has a tape of unbounded size so can’t be built simpliciter.
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.
The usual difference is just predicate ordering -- (1) for every program there exists a tape big enough vs (2) there exists a tape big enough for every program. In the first case, each individual (valid) program can get by with a tape of _some_ fixed length, but there's no bound on how big that requisite length might be. In the second case, since the tape requirements can be arbitrarily high you would need a legitimately infinite tape to service all possible programs.
IMO the given example muddies the waters a bit by conflating the conceptual tape a given machine is running on (which might be infinite for non-halting programs) with the physical tape you've used so far (for which it suffices for such tape to be finite at any fixed moment in time, though the amount needed might grow unboundedly as time increases).
In a theoretical sense, an unbounded number is always finite.
In a practical sense, turing machines don't voraciously consume tape. Adding extra feet of tape gives you an exponential increase in what you can compute. So if you set up a program to be reasonably judicious with its tape use, you can just say that if it reaches an end you pause it for a day, head to the shop, and buy another reel. Big computations take a lot of time anyway.
Some parts of mathematics deal with infinite sequences, that is, actually infinite lists of numbers. It's usually assumed, and important for analysis, that these numbers are considered to be "all there" right from the beginning. You can do operations like: Compute the limit. Add up all of its elements. Determine whether two sequences are identical for all entries after the trillionth.
I think this is often part of the misunderstanding when you stumble into a post by someone who's confused about 0.999... = 1. People sometimes write things like: "0.999... only moves closer and closer to 1, it never reaches 1." I think that highlights a deeper point than people usually give these comments credit for. The thing is, 0.999... doesn't "move" anywhere, it's considered a completed object right from the beginning.
Anyway, the point is that Turing machines are not like this at all. They only look at a fixed-size part of the tape during each step, from this follows that they have only used a finite amount of tape at each point of their execution.
So for any given (halting) computation, you don't actually need an infinite tape, you just need "enough", without changing the result. This is important because it makes Turing machines a model for practical computers. For example, the device you're reading this on has gigabytes of tape, and that's big enough for many, many, many kinds of computation.
> the Turing machine model is designed to be a mechanistic model of what a mathematician does (in rote day-to-day tasks at least)
Or more accurately, what human computers did in those days (i.e. the rooms full of people algorithmically working out numerical calculations for e.g. physicists or whatever without understanding what they were doing beyond the mechanical steps they were taking). In other words a formalization of so-called effective methods.
I'm with you, I also found Turing's argument that his machine model captures all of computation very convincing and pointed that out in another thread.
However, for this argument to work, we need to accept both that all computation is captured by Turing machines, and also that what Turing machines do is in fact computable. In essence, Turing machine <=> realizable machine. Maybe some people are more impressed by one, others more by the other direction of that double implication.
This dualism in CS still carries on to this day. Essentially, the lambda calculus is the forefather of the functional approach to computation, while the Turing machine epitomizes the imperative paradigm.
So okay yeah it's Turing Completeness that matters the most to me as computer science, on a purely pragmatic basis: When people are pitching the latest whiz-bang doodad, the answer is always, "This isn't doing anything we couldn't already do, so how does it make things easier and do it efficiently enough for our purposes?" That's the proper question when it comes to monads, coroutines, actors, non-blocking blah blah, etc. etc.
That's really important in an industry saturated with hype, elitism and general nonsense. Anything I can do in Rust, you can do in Assembly, so I've got some explaining to do (I can probably succeed in this example, others maybe not).
If Turing actually failed to deliver the goods on "completeness", I'd really like to resolve that.
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.
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?).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not advocating telling lies. Sometimes we simplify, and doing so can be perfectly appropriate. Unfortunately that does open the stage for nitpicking and pedantry.
Story telling is how our society has transferred information since we started to communicate-- understanding the map is not the territory, nor should it be. A beautiful narrative can convey important kernels more efficiently than endless minutiae-- Awareness of this is important and elaborations are helpful for those interested in the details.
I'm reminded of, "The Glass Bead Game," which discusses an academic society that forgets the names of contributors since they're all just part of the flow of humanity
The issue with stories is they focus on unimportant bits often for propaganda reasons. Pick some arbitrary first and every country can find someone to play up as a home town hero. The US just happens to be rather quite around who “invented“ electricity but longer lasting incandescent lightbulbs and kites in lightning storms that’s the ticket. The British tend to streamline the Benchley park narrative by dropping the preceding polish contribution etc etc.
In that context narratives end up glorifying endless minutiae.
Historians are all storytellers. Critical review is important. I really like this paper which starts by paraphrasing Jane Austen, "i think it quite odd history should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention" :
Arguably our storytelling was an efficient hack in an age before writing. A story is a very high-overhead, low SNR way of communicating kernels of truth, but it's robust over time, so it allowed transfer and accumulation of knowledge across societies and generations.
But then we've invented and perfected writing, developed symbolic languages and notations (e.g. math, musical), long-duration storage media for text, and eventually networked digital computers. In terms of communicating and preserving knowledge, stories are pretty much the worst possible option you can choose.
We're comfortable with narratives because we didn't have anything else for hundreds of thousands of years. Stories are pretty much hardwired into our brains. But that doesn't make them the right choice, now that we've figured out much better alternatives.
More than that, I'm personally suspicious of stories being used in communication. There's no good reason to use them, and there's plenty of bad ones - it so happens that what makes a good story robust over time is the same thing you need to manipulate people into believing lies and shut off critical thinking.
The main benefit of stories is that they are easier for people to remember than dry details. In terms of communicating knowledge, they are the form that are most likely to stick with us as opposed to going in one ear and out the other. Especially when it comes to areas where someone doesn’t have expertise. This is as you noted incredibly prone to manipulation, but it doesn’t change that it you want a random person picked off the street to actually synthesize the knowledge you’re trying to tell them, a story is by far the way most likely to work. And I’d say that’s important, since knowledge written down somewhere that no one remembers or cares about does nothing to change the way people act.
As far as preserving information goes, no argument there. Stories aren’t a good way to preserve the truth of matters for future generations. To look and determine if the stories told have truth in them requires more detailed writing.
Stories place ideas into context, not only making them easier to remember (as mentioned by another comment) but also easier to understand. Analytic philosophers are used to dry, precise language, but even they often rely on scenarios and narratives -- this can help reveal what the reader thinks intuitively and bring that into sharper contrast. By remaining story-free you're giving pedagogy the short shrift.
What has empirically brought more folks into careers in science, dry textbooks foisted by teachers or Star Trek? I'd argue Star Trek and science fiction more generally. You can chalk that up to human failings if you like, but inspiration is a need that can't be avoided if you wish to convince.
Disagree. A finely crafted but ultimately false story can be actively harmful. A young person may think that they are not of the same caliber as "the greats" and cannot make their mark on a field, which would discourage them from trying. All the while in reality "the greats" were never as great as the historians later depicted them. "Come on in, collaborate, and make a difference" would be a much more positive message and wouldn't be any harder to explain than what amounts to the creation of personality cults.
This is where the humanities has the tech world beat. While we quibble over correct narratives and seek one option, the humanities has been completely soaked in the idea that there are nearly unlimited narratives that describe any given human endeavor and they weave together into a rich and ever-changing tapestry.
This is why a historian can read, understand (both the pros and the cons), and respect books that represent an economic history, a social history, an information history, a microhistory, and even a great-man history of a given subject without trouble.
More reason for engineers to take humanities courses!
So can I continue to prefer my narrative? It seems to gather some upvotes and some downvotes, so at least it is interesting and elicits a reaction :)
Also, the more I learn about my heroes the more I realize that they never saw themselves as ubermensch. If anything, self doubt seems to be the common thread. I think this angle does not get enough attention.
However, I agree with you on a broader point. This is just one perspective. Here is another one: Turing the historical figure is necessarily oversold because many more people than Turing the real person contributed to his aggrandizement. Like all cultural icons, Turing the idea outlived and outshined Turing the man.
> So can I continue to prefer my narrative? It seems to gather some upvotes and some downvotes, so at least it is interesting and elicits a reaction :)
I think most of that reaction isn't coming from your narrative on history, it's from accusing other commenter's narratives of being false.
Nobody here is advocating telling false stories. Saying that Turing laid the foundations for computer science is not false. It's a perfectly valid opinion to hold. We might say it's a simplification, or even an exaggeration, arguably saying he's one of them might be better, but it's not a false statement.
Setting the record straight on this matter isn't nitpicking and pedantry, it's just giving credit where it is due. Since the intent of the "simplification" isn't to deceive, this shouldn't be a problem.
I don't think it's true that these narratives (false or true) are helpful, especially when their false. I think it's counterproductive, and ultimately takes away credit from others which can impede collaboration (say one country disagrees with another on who invented something).
If there was no narrative, no idols, no celebrities, would people be less motivated to do science? Why do we need to lie to ourselves so?
> 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!
Personally I'm mostly uninterested in who did what, but maybe that's just me. It seems obvious to me that nearly every scientific discovery could have been done equally well by millions of people, it's just a matter of who had the resources to be educated, who decided to research the problem, who managed to snipe the answer first, and who had the right connections to get it acknowledged. They're still great achievements, for sure, but they're not the markers of exceptional genius we want to think they are, not for Turing or Einstein, but not for anyone at all, really.
>>They're not the markers of exceptional genius we want to think they are, not for Turing or Einstein, but not for anyone at all, really.
The point isn't to prove that they're special. The point is that something special happened and these people are designated symbols for that... and they're kind of selected for being good at this. We're not doing this for them, they're dead. The celebrity of Einstein is a deification of his relativity theories. We need idols for our symbolic world, to work without them in the real one.
But what purpose do these idols or symbols serve, exactly? I'm speaking as someone who doesn't care who came up with relativity and doesn't care whether there is a founding person of computer science or not let alone who that would be, and would like to know what others see. Is it an inspiration thing? A motivation thing?
I'd say its a bit of both inspiration and motivation. That said, I think the main motivators for these kinds of idols/heroes are to craft ethical or normative stories for how people should (or shouldn't) behave as well as to assist with teaching people theories and concepts.
Learning about why correlation doesn't equal causation (and spurrious correlations) is more impactful if you also learn about Wakefield's sins at the same time. He's a villian.
Archimedes and the bathtub is a great story - and I learned it in elementary school and still remember it and the lessons it teaches. We like to associate people with events and they help for learning and retaining information.
Not necessarily a motivational thing, but events such as these become widespread and allows for easier dissemination of information.
It's easy to see then that such events allow for the eventual "recruitment" of other scientists, and in showing society that "science is working" and "solves important problems".
Both of which serve to enrich the scientific world with new researchers and funding to keep the engine running.
Idolatry seems like an emergent property of human collective consciousness. You can try to ignore it (it's been tried), downplay it (also been tried), and ban it (and again).
Because we're flesh and blood, i.e. utterly irrational.
> If there was no narrative, no idols, no celebrities, would people be less motivated to do science? Why do we need to lie to ourselves so?
Yes, definitely, a huge amount of what motivates scientists is desire for fame, being considered a genius, Nobel prizes, scientific immortality, and so on. It is entirely unrealistic to imagine that we can stop being like this, it's almost a religious belief, akin to thinking that, one day, people can live without sin.
> Personally I'm mostly uninterested in who did what, but maybe that's just me. It seems obvious to me that nearly every scientific discovery could have been done equally well by millions of people, it's just a matter of who had the resources to be educated, who decided to research the problem, who managed to snipe the answer first, and who had the right connections to get it acknowledged. They're still great achievements, for sure, but they're not the markers of exceptional genius we want to think they are, not for Turing or Einstein, but not for anyone at all, really.
This may be an accurate description of your personality, in which you're one in a million, or it may be that you're ignorant about the things that actually drive you. The vast majority of people are driven by some kind of desire for fame, recognition, status, upvotes, and so on.
Suggesting that Turing and Einstein were not "exceptional geniuses" is bizarre. Even in proper context, they were exceptional geniuses, just among other, lesser-known, exceptional geniuses. If we take your view seriously, we remove all human agency and uniqueness, we remove the idea of an "achievement" and we can only give credit to luck, the historical process, and various contingent circumstances. Even if your view is accurate, people simply cannot live that way. Creating narratives is part of what makes us human and narratives need protagonists (idols, heroes, whatever).
> This may be an accurate description of your personality, in which you're one in a million, or it may be that you're ignorant about the things that actually drive you. The vast majority of people are driven by some kind of desire for fame, recognition, status, upvotes, and so on.
Or it might be that people who are driven by fame and recognition are more likely to become famous than those who aren't, which skews our idea of what motivates people. Given how emphatic society is about fame and money as markers of success, I feel people tend to be mistaken in the other direction: many people think they are, or should be driven by fame or money even when it simply contradicts their personality.
Even if it was indeed the case that most people are motivated by fame, I think those who aren't are more like 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 than 1 in a million. It might be 1 in a million in actually famous people, but not in the population at large.
> Even in proper context, they were exceptional geniuses, just among other, lesser-known, exceptional geniuses.
If I am correct that millions of people had the capability, that would place "exceptional genius" at 1 in 1000, or 1 in 10000. I think that's a reasonable ballpark.
> If we take your view seriously, we remove all human agency and uniqueness, we remove the idea of an "achievement" and we can only give credit to luck, the historical process, and various contingent circumstances.
Whether we acknowledge exceptional geniuses or not, it remains the case that 99.99% of people are not exceptional geniuses. Are you saying these people don't have agency, or that they aren't unique? I think we all have agency, we're all unique, and we all have achievements. Some achievements are more impactful than others, some achievements are more impressive than others, but these are not necessarily the same, and neither is necessarily remembered, because what matters most is not the person or the achievement, but how the story fits in the narrative. In any case, you don't need to care about that narrative to care about or acknowledge agency, uniqueness or achievement.
>Yes, definitely, a huge amount of what motivates scientists is desire for fame, being considered a genius, Nobel prizes, scientific immortality, and so on
That might do more harm than good. Once someone wins a Nobel, their productivity tends to decrease. Fighting over credit can be really toxic (see Newton vs Leibniz which probably stunted the development of calculus) and lead to less collaboration and knowledge sharing.
It may be unrealistic to think we can be different, but at least seeing that it's problematic should be unrelated to that. It's unrealistic to think crime will stop, but we should at least try to minimize it.
Not scientists but some of the best writers of the 20th century never got a Nobel, I'm thinking especially about Proust and Kafka (and I would say Céline was more worthy of the Nobel than Camus and especially Sartre), I'm sure the same thing happens in science in regards to this Swedish prize.
"Seems to be a lot of uneasiness, of late, about the way credit is allocated in science."
This is always been the case---medieval and renaissance thinkers would publish anagrams of their key findings because they didn't want to give someone else the advantage of knowing the finding but also wanted to prove that they thought of the idea. IIRC, Isaac Newton did not publish any of his findings until someone else threatened to publish their independent results. And he's known as the creator of calculus because the British Royal Society got into an academic slap-fight with the French.
> Seems to be a lot of uneasiness, of late, about the way credit is allocated in science.
Of late? You should read up on Newton/Leibniz hysterics over who invented calculus. The arguments over who invented the first light bulb, car, etc. Whether greek knowledge ( the foundation of western civilization ) originated in the near east or even in india. Heck, people still argue about who "discovered" america first. There is national, religious, ethnic, racial, gender, sexuality pride tied to "priority". It's not just in science/math, it's applies to everything.
> These figures are supposed to be idolized and idealized
Why? They weren't particularly good people. Neither were saints.
> Achilles elevated Greece by giving Greeks something to collectively aspire to or adulate.
Are you talking about science/knowledge or politics? But you are right on the point. It's what this is all about at the end of the day. Politics.
Without politics, the discovery/knowledge would be what is important. Because of politics, the people become the focal point.
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.
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.
It seemed more like he felt he was unfairly being uncredited. Which is probably why he wrote this - he now cares deeply about giving credit to the right people.
Surely the more noble cause for that would be giving more credit to others, rather than attempting to take away credit from a well known figure. This article is somewhat about the other important figures who's knowledge Turing's was built off, but its central point is that Turing gets too much credit.
I understand why he'd care about that if he'd been uncredited and watched peers be overcredited, but I'd hardly call it a noble work, even if it is understandable.
The article is called Turing oversold, and the article is all about who should be getting credit instead of Turing. This isn't "Hey, are you aware of all these people who helped develop computer science", its "Turing is overcredited, heres a list of other people to support my argument"
>> 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).
You_again wants his work and that of others properly recognised. For example, his article, titled Critique of Paper by "Deep Learning Conspiracy" (Nature 521 p 436) [1] that is referenced by your link to wikipedia, cites a couple dozen pioneers of deep learning, quite apart from Schmidhuber hismelf. Quoting from it:
>> 2. LBH discuss the importance and problems of gradient descent-based learning through backpropagation (BP), and cite their own papers on BP, plus a few others, but fail to mention BP's inventors. BP's continuous form was derived in the early 1960s (Bryson, 1961; Kelley, 1960; Bryson and Ho, 1969). Dreyfus (1962) published the elegant derivation of BP based on the chain rule only. BP's modern efficient version for discrete sparse networks (including FORTRAN code) was published by Linnainmaa (1970). Dreyfus (1973) used BP to change weights of controllers in proportion to such gradients. By 1980, automatic differentiation could derive BP for any differentiable graph (Speelpenning, 1980). Werbos (1982) published the first application of BP to NNs, extending thoughts in his 1974 thesis (cited by LBH), which did not have Linnainmaa's (1970) modern, efficient form of BP. BP for NNs on computers 10,000 times faster per Dollar than those of the 1960s can yield useful internal representations, as shown by Rumelhart et al. (1986), who also did not cite BP's inventors.
That is not "wanting to be the center of attention". It is very much asking for proper attribution of research results. Failing to do so is a scientific scandal, especially when the work cited has contributed towards a Turing award.
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.
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 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:
> 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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadHowever, 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.
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.
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.
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_mo...
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.
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.
Since it wasn't linked, Bombe was based on the Polish Bomba machine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)
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.
History seems to like a single origin story.
"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
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.
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_g...
Move Newton, Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein 10kms away from where they were born, surround them by a different set of chimps and the story doesnt end the same way.
A good book from Niall Ferguson - the Sqaure and the Tower - makes the case tradionally Historians have studied individuals instead of groups because its easier to collect data on one chimp versus the entire troupe.
I'm sympathetic to the marxian view of Great Men; I think it's no coincidence that the related work of Godel and Turing was published within a couple of decades of one-another, or that the ideas of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo emerged around the same time as one-another.
I'm certainly impressed by the greatness of Great Men; but I'm hard-pressed to find one whose discoveries were so remarkable, in the context of their times, that noone else could have been expected to make similar discoveries around the same time.
But Turing probably isn't more important to how you get from the Treaty of Bern in 1874 (creating the UPU thus you could now practically write letters in Paris and send them to New York and it Just Works™ albeit it's expensive and slow) to the Internet than, say, Godel (more fundamental observations about the nature of mathematics that underpin computation) or Grace Hopper (the first compiler although today we'd say this is only a linker). Her Navy bosses couldn't immediately see any value for it. But Grace is apparently the first to make use of the meta-applicability of computing - the minutiae of actually programming the computer are tiresome, a lot of rote tasks perfectly suited to a machine, so, why not have the computer do those parts for you?
Doesn't diminish their achievement in my mind.
<https://graph.global/?id=2851>
Once you start digging you realize that nothing is as simple. For example for physics, "Physics for Poets" by Robert H. March is an eye opener.
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 public about their contributions.
And Turing's contributions were genuinely ground-breaking, there's a reason that computer science is lousy with concepts named after or by him (Turing machines, Turing-completeness, even the word "computing" was arguably coined in "On Computable Numbers"). He also thought deeply and hard about the philosophical implications to computing in a way that others didn't (the "Turing test" being the obvious example).
In addition: when a mathematically inclined person describes any kind of mathematical concept to laymen, the first question is always "Yeah, but what is that actually useful for?", asked with a certain amount of disdain. With Turing, the answer is powerful: "How about defeating the Nazis and laying the foundation for modern society?". That case is harder to make for Church or Gödel: they obviously didn't work for the GCSE, and "lambda calculus" as a concept is a much more abstract thing than Turing machines, which laymen can readily understand (i.e. it's "just" a computer).
Add to that the fact that Turing's story is not just about computing, or code-breaking, it's also the story of the suffering that society inflicted on gay men. The fact that he was shamed into suicide is just all the more reason to celebrate him now.
I agree with the basic point of the article, but I have no issue with giving Alan Turing this title. He earned it.
He applied computational thinking all over the place, showing great foresight in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern
Please don’t diminish his legacy by repeating this lie. Turings suicide is contentious and circumstantial at best. His documented behaviour had none of the very common signs of suicide - there was no note, he had plans for later in the week, and none of his close friends noted any change in behaviour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture
von Neumann simply described the work of Eckert and Mauchly on the ENIAC in a written report. And his name was on the report which made people think that he came up with the idea, which was false. It also resulted in a patent dispute -- it's interesting to imagine what would have happened if the concept had been patented. The book goes into detail on this.
The wikipedia article also talks about Turing machines as a precedent that store data and code in the same place. But ironically I'd say that probably gives him too much credit! I think a large share should go to the people who designed a working machine, because it's easy to say come up with the idea of an airplane; much harder to make it work :) And to me it seems unlikely that the Turing Machine, which was an idea created to prove mathematical facts, was a major inspiration for the design of the ENIAC.
Finally, even though the author of this web page has his own credit dispute, I appreciate this elaboration on the credit assigned to Turing.
Actually, it was a study group to come up with the successor to ENIAC (called EDVAC) which included Eckert, Mauchly, von Neumann, Goldstine and Burks. Von Neumann was the last to join, but wrote down the group's conclusions in a memo meant for the group. Herman Goldstine typed that up into a nice report but listed von Neumann as the sole author and distributed 24 copies to researchers. Many new copies of the report were made and circulated causing confusion about who had created the ideas.
George Dyson's "Turing's Cathedral", on the other hand, argues that von Neumann's close relationship with Gödel had a major role in getting the stored program idea adopted by the EDVAC group.
So, Founding Fathers of computing science becomes mixed - starting from those low brow thinkers we call journalists - with the idea of Founding Father of computing. And this is not only unfair, but technically wrong.
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"?
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.
Jailing or sterilizing gay people for having sex is evil. End of story. It has only been 20 years since this was the law in some US states. I see no reason why vigorous rejection of this sort of policy as monstrous can possibly be seen as "oversensitive and hyper-reactive".
The point isn't that this oversensitivity is misplaced, the point is that it's moral outrage porn that the tellers of the story use in a smart way to get a reaction from you.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing if it's just one or two story among others, after all the purpose of art is to get strong reactions out of its audience. But when every such story has to lean hard into the moral aspect to the exclusion of all else it becomes a trite children story told for nothing else but feel-good points.
Consider the amount of articles on trump during his presidency. How much of it was high-quality investigative journalism telling you things you don't know, and how much was "Trump tweeted something shockingly stupid, here are a list of experts you don't need telling you this is shockingly stupid, this means End Of Democracy (EOD)" ? The latter articles are technically true, but it's trite and accomplishes nothing but pulling on your memetic levers to get you to like/share/feel-bad|good-all-day.
So much for the Polish Cipher Bureau. Not so many tragic hero opportunities there.
The Bombe helps break Enigma, and thus is an early part of Ultra and arguably does "save World War 2" but it has no more relevance to your phone or your TikTok app than does the Rubik's cube or the slide rule.
Colossus isn't very far from the Bombe today, you might likely visit both on the same trip, but Turing didn't build it, and although it's clearly in some sense a computer, it is critically lacking in some features you'd want from a general purpose computer since it had a single purpose, to break Tunny in the mid 1940s.
In some sense Colossus is relevant to your phone and TikTok, because it is a computer, but, Turing didn't work on it and it isn't their direct ancestor by any means at all.
After reading that I sat here for a minute and racked my brain as to who my childhood 'hero' might be. I can't remember a single person.
It's amusing to me how much of intellectual work deals in a currency of status. Getting/giving credit for things appears to be the Prime Directive, at least among the observers. We've now graduated to not only stressing who is responsible but what demographic groups they are a part of.
Now, it could be that the real deal groundbreaking folks don't give a damn. Tip o' the hat to those people.
It's like calling astronomy "telescopy", to paraphrase Dijkstra.
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.
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’.
There is now a memorial at Bletchley Park to the Polish mathematicians who worked on Enigma.
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.
- 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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Historical_...
Just don't expect historical accuracy from a Hollywood movie. Cleopatra didn't look like Elizabeth Taylor either.
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.
Among so much that’s just plain wrong, I really dislike the insidious idea that Turing’s horrible punishment at the hands of the state was wrong because he was a unique genius and war hero. No, it was wrong because he was a human being and being gay should not be a crime!
That line of thought makes it harder to argue that no, Turing may have been a genius but wasn’t unique, he was just a significant player in a rich field. That doesn’t make him any less interesting.
100% agree, an unfortunate mentality all too present in society, where we tend to build narratives of feeling bad for people because are exceptional, and not because they are people
See the classic kids story of “oh the store tried to kick the hobo out but actually he was a millionaire!!!” How about treating all people like human beings even if they aren’t like… valuable to you
I think register machines are more intuitive than Turing machines - they are much closer to how real world computers work.
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”.
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.
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.
The Turing machine model is a mechanically plausible abstraction of a human performing a computation by following some steps in their mind and with a notebook. The tape stands in for the notebook. The read head stands in for the human's eyes. The write head stands in for their pencil hand. The internal state of the machine stands in for their mental state. At every step, you either read a symbol from the notebook tape and change your mental state in relation to this symbol, or write a symbol based on the current mental state. The procedure itself can be written on the tape, and you can occasionally refer back to it.
The original paper spends a good few pages working out this metaphor and showing that the machine model perfectly abstracts the mathematician's work of computation.
If you're trying to imagine something you can mechanically assemble out of discrete compoonents, it's not so great. You need an unlimited number of components hooked up in complicated ways.
A turing machine is a fixed-size and relatively simple box, plus a long tape that feeds through.
Of course Turing machine is more easy to understand because... it's a theoritical machine, after all. On the other side, lambda calculus was weirder, I didn't get it until learning Haskell :D
Not proving, conjecturing. It's not proven until this day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis
Also, it can’t perform any computation, if we say hypercomputation is a form of computation. Hypercomputation is (as far as we know) physically impossible, but so strictly speaking are Turing machines - a true Turing machine has unlimited storage, and an unlimited amount of time in which to complete its computations - any Turing machine you could physically construct would only be a finite approximation of a real one.
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 what a mathematician does (in rote day-to-day tasks at least). The tape is a representation of the notebook where the mathematician writes down notes. The read head is a representation of the mathematician reading from the notebook.
It's fascinating to read the paper because of this, since it spends quite a few paragraphs showing that this simplification doesn't lose anything of the mathematician's work. It spends some time noting that even though paper is two-dimensional, it can be losslessly compressed on unidimensional tape. It spends time noting that writing/reading one symbol at a time is a good enough approximation for human writing/reading. It spends time noting that the next step doesn't need to depend on more than the current symbol + internal state, as human attention is also focused on a limited number of symbols.
This is actually why Turing's paper is so convincing on the argument of universal computation - not because the machine is realizable, but because it's hard to invent anything that a mathematician does while calculating that is not captured by the Turing machine model.
I very much recommend reading the first part of the paper [0] to see this argument (the second part, where it is proven that this abstract machine can in fact compute all known numbers, is more technical and flew over my own head).
[0] PDF https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf
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.
Moreover although it turns out that that model of computation is very robust and sufficient for all purposes in physics (unless black holes or something allow hypercomputation) Turing does not really definitively show that and in a way that can’t be definitively shown. All we have is a lack of counterexamples (admittedly a very convincing one.)
I don’t see why this intuition is that helpful generally either; Turing machines don't really help at an implementation level with modern engineering problems as far as I can tell. Most of the time you know that what you want to do is possible in finite time &c.—presumably the difficulty is doing what you want to do, and going via the Turing formalism would be a bit odd.
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.
IMO the given example muddies the waters a bit by conflating the conceptual tape a given machine is running on (which might be infinite for non-halting programs) with the physical tape you've used so far (for which it suffices for such tape to be finite at any fixed moment in time, though the amount needed might grow unboundedly as time increases).
In a practical sense, turing machines don't voraciously consume tape. Adding extra feet of tape gives you an exponential increase in what you can compute. So if you set up a program to be reasonably judicious with its tape use, you can just say that if it reaches an end you pause it for a day, head to the shop, and buy another reel. Big computations take a lot of time anyway.
I think this is often part of the misunderstanding when you stumble into a post by someone who's confused about 0.999... = 1. People sometimes write things like: "0.999... only moves closer and closer to 1, it never reaches 1." I think that highlights a deeper point than people usually give these comments credit for. The thing is, 0.999... doesn't "move" anywhere, it's considered a completed object right from the beginning.
Anyway, the point is that Turing machines are not like this at all. They only look at a fixed-size part of the tape during each step, from this follows that they have only used a finite amount of tape at each point of their execution.
So for any given (halting) computation, you don't actually need an infinite tape, you just need "enough", without changing the result. This is important because it makes Turing machines a model for practical computers. For example, the device you're reading this on has gigabytes of tape, and that's big enough for many, many, many kinds of computation.
Or more accurately, what human computers did in those days (i.e. the rooms full of people algorithmically working out numerical calculations for e.g. physicists or whatever without understanding what they were doing beyond the mechanical steps they were taking). In other words a formalization of so-called effective methods.
However, for this argument to work, we need to accept both that all computation is captured by Turing machines, and also that what Turing machines do is in fact computable. In essence, Turing machine <=> realizable machine. Maybe some people are more impressed by one, others more by the other direction of that double implication.
That's really important in an industry saturated with hype, elitism and general nonsense. Anything I can do in Rust, you can do in Assembly, so I've got some explaining to do (I can probably succeed in this example, others maybe not).
If Turing actually failed to deliver the goods on "completeness", I'd really like to resolve that.
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.
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.
Interesting to speculate what would have happened if Zuse had been paper-clipped to the US and given a huge budget.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
I'm reminded of, "The Glass Bead Game," which discusses an academic society that forgets the names of contributors since they're all just part of the flow of humanity
In that context narratives end up glorifying endless minutiae.
https://www.cmu.edu/epp/people/faculty/research/Fischhoff-Fo...
But then we've invented and perfected writing, developed symbolic languages and notations (e.g. math, musical), long-duration storage media for text, and eventually networked digital computers. In terms of communicating and preserving knowledge, stories are pretty much the worst possible option you can choose.
We're comfortable with narratives because we didn't have anything else for hundreds of thousands of years. Stories are pretty much hardwired into our brains. But that doesn't make them the right choice, now that we've figured out much better alternatives.
More than that, I'm personally suspicious of stories being used in communication. There's no good reason to use them, and there's plenty of bad ones - it so happens that what makes a good story robust over time is the same thing you need to manipulate people into believing lies and shut off critical thinking.
As far as preserving information goes, no argument there. Stories aren’t a good way to preserve the truth of matters for future generations. To look and determine if the stories told have truth in them requires more detailed writing.
What has empirically brought more folks into careers in science, dry textbooks foisted by teachers or Star Trek? I'd argue Star Trek and science fiction more generally. You can chalk that up to human failings if you like, but inspiration is a need that can't be avoided if you wish to convince.
This is why a historian can read, understand (both the pros and the cons), and respect books that represent an economic history, a social history, an information history, a microhistory, and even a great-man history of a given subject without trouble.
More reason for engineers to take humanities courses!
Also, the more I learn about my heroes the more I realize that they never saw themselves as ubermensch. If anything, self doubt seems to be the common thread. I think this angle does not get enough attention.
However, I agree with you on a broader point. This is just one perspective. Here is another one: Turing the historical figure is necessarily oversold because many more people than Turing the real person contributed to his aggrandizement. Like all cultural icons, Turing the idea outlived and outshined Turing the man.
I think most of that reaction isn't coming from your narrative on history, it's from accusing other commenter's narratives of being false.
If there was no narrative, no idols, no celebrities, would people be less motivated to do science? Why do we need to lie to ourselves so?
> 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!
Personally I'm mostly uninterested in who did what, but maybe that's just me. It seems obvious to me that nearly every scientific discovery could have been done equally well by millions of people, it's just a matter of who had the resources to be educated, who decided to research the problem, who managed to snipe the answer first, and who had the right connections to get it acknowledged. They're still great achievements, for sure, but they're not the markers of exceptional genius we want to think they are, not for Turing or Einstein, but not for anyone at all, really.
The point isn't to prove that they're special. The point is that something special happened and these people are designated symbols for that... and they're kind of selected for being good at this. We're not doing this for them, they're dead. The celebrity of Einstein is a deification of his relativity theories. We need idols for our symbolic world, to work without them in the real one.
Learning about why correlation doesn't equal causation (and spurrious correlations) is more impactful if you also learn about Wakefield's sins at the same time. He's a villian.
Archimedes and the bathtub is a great story - and I learned it in elementary school and still remember it and the lessons it teaches. We like to associate people with events and they help for learning and retaining information.
It's easy to see then that such events allow for the eventual "recruitment" of other scientists, and in showing society that "science is working" and "solves important problems".
Both of which serve to enrich the scientific world with new researchers and funding to keep the engine running.
Because we're flesh and blood, i.e. utterly irrational.
> If there was no narrative, no idols, no celebrities, would people be less motivated to do science? Why do we need to lie to ourselves so?
Yes, definitely, a huge amount of what motivates scientists is desire for fame, being considered a genius, Nobel prizes, scientific immortality, and so on. It is entirely unrealistic to imagine that we can stop being like this, it's almost a religious belief, akin to thinking that, one day, people can live without sin.
> Personally I'm mostly uninterested in who did what, but maybe that's just me. It seems obvious to me that nearly every scientific discovery could have been done equally well by millions of people, it's just a matter of who had the resources to be educated, who decided to research the problem, who managed to snipe the answer first, and who had the right connections to get it acknowledged. They're still great achievements, for sure, but they're not the markers of exceptional genius we want to think they are, not for Turing or Einstein, but not for anyone at all, really.
This may be an accurate description of your personality, in which you're one in a million, or it may be that you're ignorant about the things that actually drive you. The vast majority of people are driven by some kind of desire for fame, recognition, status, upvotes, and so on.
Suggesting that Turing and Einstein were not "exceptional geniuses" is bizarre. Even in proper context, they were exceptional geniuses, just among other, lesser-known, exceptional geniuses. If we take your view seriously, we remove all human agency and uniqueness, we remove the idea of an "achievement" and we can only give credit to luck, the historical process, and various contingent circumstances. Even if your view is accurate, people simply cannot live that way. Creating narratives is part of what makes us human and narratives need protagonists (idols, heroes, whatever).
Or it might be that people who are driven by fame and recognition are more likely to become famous than those who aren't, which skews our idea of what motivates people. Given how emphatic society is about fame and money as markers of success, I feel people tend to be mistaken in the other direction: many people think they are, or should be driven by fame or money even when it simply contradicts their personality.
Even if it was indeed the case that most people are motivated by fame, I think those who aren't are more like 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 than 1 in a million. It might be 1 in a million in actually famous people, but not in the population at large.
> Even in proper context, they were exceptional geniuses, just among other, lesser-known, exceptional geniuses.
If I am correct that millions of people had the capability, that would place "exceptional genius" at 1 in 1000, or 1 in 10000. I think that's a reasonable ballpark.
> If we take your view seriously, we remove all human agency and uniqueness, we remove the idea of an "achievement" and we can only give credit to luck, the historical process, and various contingent circumstances.
Whether we acknowledge exceptional geniuses or not, it remains the case that 99.99% of people are not exceptional geniuses. Are you saying these people don't have agency, or that they aren't unique? I think we all have agency, we're all unique, and we all have achievements. Some achievements are more impactful than others, some achievements are more impressive than others, but these are not necessarily the same, and neither is necessarily remembered, because what matters most is not the person or the achievement, but how the story fits in the narrative. In any case, you don't need to care about that narrative to care about or acknowledge agency, uniqueness or achievement.
That might do more harm than good. Once someone wins a Nobel, their productivity tends to decrease. Fighting over credit can be really toxic (see Newton vs Leibniz which probably stunted the development of calculus) and lead to less collaboration and knowledge sharing.
It may be unrealistic to think we can be different, but at least seeing that it's problematic should be unrelated to that. It's unrealistic to think crime will stop, but we should at least try to minimize it.
But one soon realizes you probably won't get heroic credit even if you do contribute something heroic, neutralizing that encouragement.
Therefore, you'd better do it for the love of the work itself or for how it helps others.
There's no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't mind who gets the credit.
This is always been the case---medieval and renaissance thinkers would publish anagrams of their key findings because they didn't want to give someone else the advantage of knowing the finding but also wanted to prove that they thought of the idea. IIRC, Isaac Newton did not publish any of his findings until someone else threatened to publish their independent results. And he's known as the creator of calculus because the British Royal Society got into an academic slap-fight with the French.
Of late? You should read up on Newton/Leibniz hysterics over who invented calculus. The arguments over who invented the first light bulb, car, etc. Whether greek knowledge ( the foundation of western civilization ) originated in the near east or even in india. Heck, people still argue about who "discovered" america first. There is national, religious, ethnic, racial, gender, sexuality pride tied to "priority". It's not just in science/math, it's applies to everything.
> These figures are supposed to be idolized and idealized
Why? They weren't particularly good people. Neither were saints.
> Achilles elevated Greece by giving Greeks something to collectively aspire to or adulate.
Are you talking about science/knowledge or politics? But you are right on the point. It's what this is all about at the end of the day. Politics.
Without politics, the discovery/knowledge would be what is important. Because of politics, the people become the focal point.
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
[3]: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/most-cited-neural-nets.html
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.
It seemed more like he felt he was unfairly being uncredited. Which is probably why he wrote this - he now cares deeply about giving credit to the right people.
I understand why he'd care about that if he'd been uncredited and watched peers be overcredited, but I'd hardly call it a noble work, even if it is understandable.
You_again wants his work and that of others properly recognised. For example, his article, titled Critique of Paper by "Deep Learning Conspiracy" (Nature 521 p 436) [1] that is referenced by your link to wikipedia, cites a couple dozen pioneers of deep learning, quite apart from Schmidhuber hismelf. Quoting from it:
>> 2. LBH discuss the importance and problems of gradient descent-based learning through backpropagation (BP), and cite their own papers on BP, plus a few others, but fail to mention BP's inventors. BP's continuous form was derived in the early 1960s (Bryson, 1961; Kelley, 1960; Bryson and Ho, 1969). Dreyfus (1962) published the elegant derivation of BP based on the chain rule only. BP's modern efficient version for discrete sparse networks (including FORTRAN code) was published by Linnainmaa (1970). Dreyfus (1973) used BP to change weights of controllers in proportion to such gradients. By 1980, automatic differentiation could derive BP for any differentiable graph (Speelpenning, 1980). Werbos (1982) published the first application of BP to NNs, extending thoughts in his 1974 thesis (cited by LBH), which did not have Linnainmaa's (1970) modern, efficient form of BP. BP for NNs on computers 10,000 times faster per Dollar than those of the 1960s can yield useful internal representations, as shown by Rumelhart et al. (1986), who also did not cite BP's inventors.
That is not "wanting to be the center of attention". It is very much asking for proper attribution of research results. Failing to do so is a scientific scandal, especially when the work cited has contributed towards a Turing award.
__________
[1] https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-conspiracy.ht...
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.
I also enjoyed Breaking the Code – https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115749/
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
- Turing Tales: https://dijkstrascry.com/turingtales
- The Dawn of Software Engineering: https://dijkstrascry.com/dawn
>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.
It was written by Charles Petzold, who also wrote the immensity popular book “CODE”.
https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Turing-Through-Historic-Com...
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
> 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?
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.