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

Wed Dec 24 01:53:31 PST 2014

Let’s not forget his tragic early death. As with music and literary stars, this both gives Turing's story an emotional punch and leaves the tantalizing question of what else he might have accomplished had he lived. An award named after a practitioner (rather than a donor) gives a sense that recipients are somehow following in the footsteps of the named person. If that person died young, it’s easy to imagine that recipients are even finishing his or her undone work. 
Far fewer figures in computer science die at the height of their powers than in, say, rock and roll. But when they do, the reputation-burnishing effects can be similar. Think Ada Lovelace and Steve Jobs. In rare cases, a long life even provides time for active self-diminishment a la William Shockley.
Best, Marc

> On Dec 23, 2014, at 23:05, Ceruzzi, Paul <CeruzziP at si.edu> 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/ <http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/dec/19/poor-imitation-alan-turing/>
> 
> Best,
> 
> Dag
> --
> Dag Spicer
> Senior Curator
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Marc Weber <http://www.computerhistory.org/staff/Marc,Weber/>  |   marc at webhistory.org  |   +1 415 282 6868 
Internet History Program Founder and Curator, Computer History Museum            
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