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

Willard McCarty willard.mccarty at mccarty.org.uk
Tue Dec 23 22:24:01 PST 2014


Alan Perlis, first to be given the Award, begins his lecture (JACM 14.1, 
1967) after a typically humorous remark by discussing Turing's importance:

> On what does and will the fame of Turing rest? That he proved a
> theorem showing that for a general computing device--later dubbed a
> "Turing machine"--there existed functions which it could not compute?
> I doubt it. More likely it rests on the model he invented and
> employed: his formal mechanism.
>
> This model has captured the imagination and mobilized the thoughts of
> a generation of scientists. It has provided a basis for arguments
> leading to theories. His model has proved so useful that its
> generated activity has been distributed not only in mathematics, but
> through several technologies as well. The arguments that have been
> employed are not always formal and the consequent creations not all
> abstract. Indeed a most fruitful consequence of the Turing machine
> has been with the creation, study and computation of functions which
> are computable, i.e., in computer programming. This is not surprising
> since computers can compute so much more than we yet know how to
> specify.
>
> I am sure that all will agree that this model has been enormously
> valuable. History will forgive me for not devoting any attention in
> this lecture to the effect which Turing had on the development of the
> general-purpose digital computer, which has further accelerated our
> involvement with the theory and practice of computation.

Unfortunately it would appear that the deliberations of the ACM about 
this Award prior to Perlis' lecture were not published -- or perhaps 
were only not digitized?

Yours,
WM

On 23/12/2014 22:05, Ceruzzi, Paul wrote:
> Perhaps his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” also
> played a role in naming the prize. It was widely read and reprinted; it
> was accessible to a lay audience; and it dovetailed nicely with the
> interest in AI among ACM members in the mid-1950s. That paper, alone,
> would not have been enough to give Turing enough gravitas for a named
> ACM award. But that paper, plus his 1936 theoretical paper, plus his
> work on the Pilot ACE (also well-publicized), were more than enough: he
> demonstrated capability in a wide range of computing.
>
> *From:*members-bounces at sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org]
> *On Behalf Of *Mounier Kuhn
> *Sent:* Tuesday, December 23, 2014 3:27 PM
> *To:* members; Dag Spicer; Dave Walden; Alberts, Gerard; Edgar Daylight
> *Subject:* Re: [SIGCIS-Members] NY Review of Books: The Imitation Game
> -- a question
>
> Dear friends and colleagues,
>
> I am quite interested in these questions too, and curious about the (yet
> unexplicited?) reasons why the ACM people named their award after
> Turing. And even more about who knew « Turing » in continental Europe.
> Actually it was less a Dr. Alan Turing who was becoming known in the
> computing community than the concept of the /Turing machine/. For the
> anecdote, in the 1960s a Greek student in C.Sc. heard of this concept
> and spent hours searching for the English verb "to ture"… He is one of
> the authors of « Logicomix », this splendid comics book about the
> history of mathematical logic.
>
>  From what I understand, Turing became a recognized hero through a
> three-stage process:
>
> 1) In the mid-1960s when the ACM, at the forefront of the struggle to
> get Computing recognized as a science, chose him to name a new award
> (cf. Gerard’s, Edgar’s and Irina’s publications), making Turing a father
> of a future « theoretical computer science ».
>
> 2) In the mid-1970s when Her Majesty's government disclosed some
> information about Ultra: Turing, and collectively the codebreakers at
> Blechtley Park, thus became new heroes of WW2, somehow joining the
> league of the Hurricane and Spitfire pilots of the Battle of England.
>
> 3) One or two decades later, in the wake of Andrew Hodges’ book, when
> Alan Turing became also a gay icon.
>
> This to answer the question: « Why did we celebrated a Turing centennial
> two years ago? »
>
> More on early Turing readers. I found out that a Swedish scholar, Dr.
> Lars Löfgren, had presented a paper on « Automata of High Complexity and
> Methods of Increasing their Reliability by Redundancy », at the/Congrès
> international de l’Automatique/, (Paris, 18-24 June 1956), published in
> 1959 in the proceedings, and again in /Information and Control/, vol. 1,
> n° 2, May 1958, p. 127-147. His paper summarized and discussed Alan
> Turing’s articles, « On computable numbers […] » (1936) et « Computing
> machinery and intelligence », /Mind/ (1950), and of J. von Neumann
> (1951) and C.E. Shannon et J. McCarthy (1956) on Automata. Lars Löfgren
> worked for the Defense Institute in Stockholm, and eventually became
> professor of system theory at the University of Lund in 1963. He may be
> tagged as a "cybernetician". Any more information would be welcome !
>
> Merry Christmas to all,
>
> Pierre
>
> Le 22 déc. 2014 à 19:07, Alberts, Gerard <G.Alberts at uva.nl
> <mailto:G.Alberts at uva.nl>> a écrit :
>
>
>
> 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 <mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org>
> [members-bounces at sigcis.org <mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org>] namens
> Dave Walden [dave.walden.family at gmail.com
> <mailto: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
> --
> Dag Spicer
> Senior Curator
> Computer History Museum
> Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
> 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard
> Mountain View, CA 94043-1311
>
> Tel: +1 650 810 1035
> Fax: +1 650 810 1055
>
> Twitter: @ComputerHistory
>
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> --
> home address: 12 Linden Rd., E. Sandwich, MA 02537
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>
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-- 
Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/), Professor, Department of Digital
Humanities, King's College London, and Digital Humanities Research
Group, University of Western Sydney



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