Alan Turing, the father of the computer, is finally getting his due
Source: Washington Post
For Alan Turings many admirers, the centenary of his birth on Saturday is an occasion for both celebration and mourning. Here, after all, is the architect of the modern computer, the code-breaker whose ingenuity ensured an Allied victory in World War II and the father of artificial intelligence. Yet Turing was also a victim of a pernicious and paranoid strain of sexual hypocrisy in 20th-century England. Nor, in the 21st, has the victimization wholly ceased.
Turings remarkable career was marked by happenstance. In 1936, when he was a student at Cambridge, he attended a lecture in which M.H.A. Max Newman characterized an old and thorny logic problem as a matter of finding a mechanical process for testing the validity of a mathematical assertion. Turing took the phrase mechanical process at face value and wrote a paper in which he laid out the architecture of a hypothetical machine to do the testing what became known as the Turing machine. The paper, intended for specialists, amounted to a blueprint for the modern computer, a universal machine that could do the work of an infinity of single-use machines.
The fortuitous breakthroughs continued. During World War II, Turing was among a group of thinkers summoned by the British government to Bletchley Park to help crack the seemingly airtight German Enigma code. Because the code was generated by a machine, Turing decided, only a machine could break it. He went on to design and help build that machine the Bombe, without which the Allies might have lost the war thereby instigating a huge leap forward in the field of cryptanalysis.
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To avoid a similar fate, Turing agreed to submit to a course of estrogen therapy intended to cure him of his homosexuality; as a result, he grew breasts and became impotent. Yet even after the treatment ended, the police, fearing that he might defect to the Soviet Union, stayed on his trail, interrupting every effort he made to live life as he saw fit. In June 1954, Turing committed suicide by biting into an apple laced with cyanide a nod to his favorite film, Walt Disneys Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/alan-turing-father-of-computer-science-not-yet-getting-his-due/2012/06/22/gJQA5eUOvV_story.html
Happy 100th birthday. What a pointed reminder of cruelty humans can commit to each other, and extinguish a genius who gave us so much, and had so much left to give.
Kennah
(14,290 posts)msongs
(67,429 posts)CBHagman
(16,987 posts)It aired on what was then known as Mobil Masterpiece Theatre and now is simply Masterpiece.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115749/
You can watch the whole film on YouTube, I believe.
It's harrowing to read that Turing's particular means of suicide was not a liberty taken by the script writer.
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)nofurylike
(8,775 posts)Alan Turing: Inquest's suicide verdict 'not supportable'By Roland Pease
BBC Radio Science Unit
23 June 2012 Last updated at 03:52 ET
BBC News? - 41 minutes ago
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18561092
Alan Turing, the British mathematical genius and codebreaker, may not have committed suicide, as is widely believed, claims an academic.
At a conference in Oxford on Saturday, Turing expert Prof Jack Copeland will question the evidence that was presented at the 1954 inquest.
-snip-
Indeed, he argues, Turing's death may equally probably have been an accident.
-snip-
The problem, he complains, is that the investigation was conducted so poorly that even murder cannot be ruled out. An "open verdict", recognising this degree of ignorance, would be his preferred position.
-snip-
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ohgeewhiz
(193 posts)Alan Turing's 100th birthday: Google doodles a Turing Machine
Just go there and see what comes up.
Today only, if you are reading this tomorrow, you won't see it.
dipsydoodle
(42,239 posts)Last edited Sat Jun 23, 2012, 08:30 AM - Edit history (1)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12287442ohgeewhiz
(193 posts)aquart
(69,014 posts)I made the mistake of putting a background on my basic Google page and Google has never forgiven me. I've tried to dump the background but I just get ...limbo.
Webster Green
(13,905 posts)Click on the little gear looking icon on the upper right, and choose "Classic Home" from the drop-down menu.
aquart
(69,014 posts)Response to ohgeewhiz (Reply #5)
dipsydoodle This message was self-deleted by its author.
Behind the Aegis
(53,965 posts)daaron
(763 posts)I wanted to write something along those lines. How he's a hero to so many for so many different reasons - including saving the fucking world!
It always makes me sad to think about Turing. He was the ultimate "freak" of his times - a gay ultra-nerd in the middle of WWII. I like to think if he was alive, today, he'd be adored.
Here's to you, Alan M. Turing! You changed the world. I just wish you'd been able to know it before you left it.
Vidar
(18,335 posts)The Jungle 1
(4,552 posts)Why does it take so long to fix the injustice that still plagues us. Everybody know it is wrong yet we still continue down this path of stupidity.
We would have lost that war if that code hadn't been broken. Just imagine the injustice we would live under then.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Such men as he don't come along very often.
And a stirring indictment of homophobia, the way he was treated after the contributions he made.
Brickbat
(19,339 posts)resulted from his carelessness with dangerous chemicals. Still others believe it was a suicide, but staged in such a way that his loved ones could plausibly deny it as a suicide. In any case, a tragic and fascinating figure.
dipsydoodle
(42,239 posts)Alan Turing, the British mathematical genius and codebreaker born 100 years ago on 23 June, may not have committed suicide, as is widely believed.
At a conference in Oxford on Saturday, Turing expert Prof Jack Copeland will question the evidence that was presented at the 1954 inquest.
He believes the evidence would not today be accepted as sufficient to establish a suicide verdict.
Indeed, he argues, Turing's death may equally probably have been an accident.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18561092
ohgeewhiz
(193 posts)athenasatanjesus
(859 posts)Thereby getting their trolls off of the internet,and we can start winning the information war.
beac
(9,992 posts)Can you imagine how he might have advanced our culture and understanding had he lived a full lifetime?
What a horrible, horrible waste.