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@si.edu <mailto:CeruzziP@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@sigcis.org <mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org> [mailto:members-bounces@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@uva.nl <mailto:G.Alberts@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@sigcis.org <mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org> [members-bounces@sigcis.org <mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org>] namens Dave Walden [dave.walden.family@gmail.com <mailto:dave.walden.family@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
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