[SIGCIS-Members] NY Review of Books: The Imitation Game -- a question

[Alberts, Gerard]

Dear Dave,
let us ask Edgar Daylight what he has to say on this. He and I did work on precisely this question for a while, but our findings did not yet reach the stage of formal publication. Basically the impression is that the Perlis and Carr gang, busy in creating a venue for exchange of software ideas (Communications of the ACM), went on to create a professional identity. Part of such effort, of course, is to name one's heroes. Probably from the US perspective pointing at the Englishman Turing was a safe choice. There is no indication that Turing was in any way the cult figure he is today.
Edgar's bold entry question at the time was how many of the Turing awardees would have actually read the work of Turing.

An exceptionally early, and to my knowledge the earliest explicit computer science continuation on Turing's 1936 article is by E.F. Moore, 'A simplified universal Turing machine', in Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery; Meeting at Toronto, Ont. Sept 8-10, 1952 (Washington, ACM, 1952), 50-55.

Christmas thoughts,
Gerard

________________________________________
Van: members-bounces at sigcis.org [members-bounces at sigcis.org] namens Dave Walden [dave.walden.family at gmail.com]
Verzonden: maandag 22 december 2014 17:39
Aan: Dag Spicer; members
Onderwerp: [SIGCIS-Members] NY Review of Books: The Imitation Game -- a question

Hi,
With all this emphasis on Turing these days, including the 100th
anniversary celebration a couple of years ago and opinions about how
fundamental Turing was to how much that came later, I am curious if
anyone knows what the ACM people were thinking when they named their
award after Turing only a decade or so after his death.  Did they
already see him as important historically as he is seen today? Did
they think he had been a brilliant many whose life ended badly and
who thus deserved memorializing?  ...?  I suppose there may have been
some writing in the CACM when the award was named or first awarded,
and I can go try to find that.  In any case, I am wondering if anyone
knows what the committee members (or whomever) who decided on this
name for the award were thinking.
Dave


At 11:54 AM 12/21/2014, Dag Spicer wrote:
>http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/dec/19/poor-imitation-alan-turing/
>
>Best,
>
>Dag
>--
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>Computer History Museum
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This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members