[SIGCIS-Members] NY Review of Books: The Imitation Game -- a question
James Sumner
james.sumner at manchester.ac.uk
Wed Dec 24 03:56:58 PST 2014
Dear all
When discussing this question it's interesting to compare the often
overlooked "Author's Note" at the back of Hodges' biography, the first
part of which is essentially a history of Turing's reputation to 1983.
On Hodges' account, Turing's most influential promoter by far in the
years immediately after his death was Max Newman, and the vision that
emerged was very partial, in line with Newman's mathematical priorities:
Turing the high logician, of no more than academic interest to the
growing world of practical computers. Hodges has little time for the
other main early source, Sara Turing's tribute to her son, and suggests
a standard view emerging in reference sources in the 1960s from these
two origin points alone, which largely vested Turing's importance in his
1936 work. In discussing what changed in the 1970s to make a
reassessment possible (in which his own contribution, of course, was
key), Hodges particularly credits Donald Michie, who was not only among
the most proactive of the several Bletchley Park veterans fighting to
overturn the longstanding secrecy, but, as the director of the Edinburgh
group, the leading spokesman for Artificial Intelligence interests in
the UK community. It would be interesting to map how closely British
appeals to Turing's name and work connected with those in the US.
Two other well-known sightings of Turing, from the period of his
apparent obscurity, are worth noting:
- Maboth Moseley's 1964 biography of Charles Babbage -- himself still in
the process of iconisation -- refers briefly and unexpectedly to Turing
as “another Englishman of genius” who carried Babbage’s torch in 1936 --
in line with the Newman view, but with a lack of supplementary detail
which may suggest growing familiarity (Moseley was editor of a computer
industry review periodical);
- "turingineer" and "turologist" appear in the whimsical list of
suggested terms for the emerging profession in an editorial response to
a letter to the /Communications of the ACM/ in 1958. Putting Turing and
engineering in the same conceptual space (let alone the same word) meant
stepping far beyond the picture of Turing's signficiance which Hodges
indicates was standard in the literature of the time.
Finally, to follow up on Pierre's anecdote: my first regular access to
the internet came in 1995 via the Turing Room, the modest basement IT
facility of King's College Cambridge. My undergraduate generation
doubtless thought it was being hilariously original in devising the verb
"to ture" (approximately, "to check email; to scramble together an
ill-prepared essay late at night; to spend a very long time waiting for
Mosaic to load"), as had the previous generation and, I'd guess, all
subsequent generations. The room was not especially chilly in winter,
but any outer garment apparently being worn for the purposes of turing
was inevitably a turing shroud.
All best
James
On 24/12/2014 09:53, Marc Weber wrote:
> 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
>> <mailto: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>
>> [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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org
>> <mailto: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
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> home address: 12 Linden Rd., E. Sandwich, MA 02537
>> home ph=508-888-7655; cell ph = 503-757-3137 (often don't carry it)
>> email address: dave at walden-family.com
>> <mailto:dave at walden-family.com>; website:
>> <http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/>http://www.walden-family.com/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org
>> <mailto: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
>> _______________________________________________
>> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org
>> <mailto: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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org
>> <mailto: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
>
> Marc Weber <http://www.computerhistory.org/staff/Marc,Weber/> |
> marc at webhistory.org <mailto:marc at webhistory.org> | +1 415 282 6868
> Internet History Program Founder and Curator, Computer History Museum
> 1401 N Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View CA 94043
> computerhistory.org/nethistory <http://computerhistory.org/nethistory>
> Co-founder, Web History Center and Project, webhistory.org
> <http://webhistory.org>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/attachments/20141224/6ef07433/attachment-0001.htm>
More information about the Members
mailing list