>That's news to me -- #2 and #3, that is.
>You learn something new every day. If
>only it was always true.
It's true -- every day is a new day!
***** ALAN MATHISON TURING:
THE MAKER OF OUR AGE
By Justin Leiber
Introduction
In his short life, Alan Turing (1912-1954) made foundational contributions to philosophy, mathematics, biology, artificial intelligence, and computer science. He, as much as anyone, invented the digital electronic computer. From September, 1939 much of his work on computation was war-driven and brutally practical. He developed high speed computing devices needed to decipher German Enigma Machine messages to and from U-boats, countering the most serious threat by far to Britain's survival during World War Two. Yet few people have an image of him.
Because of official secrecy, his war time exploits were unknown until the 1980s. By that time some of his inventions were so well absorbed that they no longer seemed connected to a real human being. Literature buffs read classics. Scientists just cite them. For example, Turing's 1936 paper, "On Computable Numbers," was almost instantly recognized to be the most important theoretical paper ever written on computation. Soon it was absorbed into every textbook. And soon many mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists came to write of "turing machines" and "universal turing machines" almost or completely forgetting that there was an Alan Turing. Almost the same thing happened with his breezy and very readable 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." From it scientists and philosophers extracted the goal of writing "intelligent" computer programs good enough to pass the "turing test" for simulating human intelligence. While some computer scientists boasted that they would program a "passer" within a decade, they have not come close after five decades.
On the other hand, some of Turing's work was so far ahead of his time that it earned credit only in retrospect. His last published paper (1952) anticipated the most important new approach in developmental biology. But it wasn't until the late 1970s that scientists began to refer to "turing structures"! Similarly, Turing suggested several other ways, aside from programming, that might be used to simulate human intelligence. When he did so, he anticipated approaches that have been ballyhooed in the 1980s and 1990s.
Personally, Alan Turing was amiable, eccentric, and modest. He didn't put his name on any of his discoveries. The world did that. At one point during the war, he couldn't find his belt and went to work, as director of the Enigma decrypting effort, with string holding his pants up. He didn't get around to replacing the string for weeks. He was also a marathon runner and might well have represented Britain in the 1948 Olympic Games if he had not damaged his knee in the run ups.... <http://bentley.uh.edu/philosophy/leiber/turing.delphian.htm> *****
Yoshie