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@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
Twitter: @ComputerHistory
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