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

Wed Dec 24 01:12:54 PST 2014

 On Tue, 23 Dec 2014 21:35 Mounier Kuhn <mounier at msh-paris.fr> wrote:

Pierre,
That group Lars belonged to at FOA is legendary among programmers. OOP in
the simula/smalltalk tradition, LISP as pure lambda calculus, and not least
abstract data types, invaded lecture halls at Scandinavian universities in
the 70s and 80s. Turing machine programming courses were on all big uni
curricula until about a decade ago. Now you have to dig into compiler- or
complexity theory courses to find the "abstract hackers". In the 90s I ran
yearly competitions in TM programming (sob).

Lars, like many other people in that group at FOA is still active as an
emeritus. He has two projects listed here:

http://www.eit.lth.se/index.php?gpuid=1&L=0
M.

 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> 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 [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
--
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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