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@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@walden-family.com; website: <http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/>http://www.walden-family.com/
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 [members-bounces@sigcis.org] namens Dave Walden [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
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@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@walden-family.com; website: <http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/>http://www.walden-family.com/ _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@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
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> 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 [members-bounces@sigcis.org] namens Dave Walden [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
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@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@walden-family.com; website: <http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/>http://www.walden-family.com/
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@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@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
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 _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org<mailto:members@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@walden-family.com<mailto:dave@walden-family.com>; website: <http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/>http://www.walden-family.com/ _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org<mailto:members@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@sigcis.org<mailto:members@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
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
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org <mailto:members@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@walden-family.com <mailto:dave@walden-family.com>; website: <http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/>http://www.walden-family.com/
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org <mailto:members@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@sigcis.org <mailto:members@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@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
-- Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/), Professor, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London, and Digital Humanities Research Group, University of Western Sydney
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> 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/ <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@sigcis.org <mailto:members@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/ <http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/> and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members <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@walden-family.com <mailto:dave@walden-family.com>; website: <http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/ <http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/>>http://www.walden-family.com/ <http://www.walden-family.com/>
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org <mailto:members@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/ <http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/> and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members <http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members> _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org <mailto:members@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/ <http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/> and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members <http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members>
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Marc Weber <http://www.computerhistory.org/staff/Marc,Weber/> | marc@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
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
Twitter: @ComputerHistory
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org <mailto:members@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@walden-family.com <mailto:dave@walden-family.com>; website: <http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/>http://www.walden-family.com/
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org <mailto:members@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@sigcis.org <mailto:members@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@sigcis.org <mailto:members@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@webhistory.org <mailto:marc@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@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
On Tue, 23 Dec 2014 21:35 Mounier Kuhn <mounier@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@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 [members-bounces@sigcis.org] namens Dave Walden [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 _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@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@walden-family.com; website: <http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/>http://www.walden-family.com/ _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@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@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@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
Hi Dave: A good question. I was a member and than chair of the Turing Award Committee a few years ago, and do no recall anything among the explanatory paperwork that we were given which would answer you question. Cheers Brian On 22 Dec 2014, at 16:39, Dave Walden <dave.walden.family@gmail.com> wrote:
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@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@walden-family.com; website: <http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/>http://www.walden-family.com/ _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@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
-- School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK EMAIL = Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 FAX = +44 191 208 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell
participants (9)
-
Alberts, Gerard -
Brian Randell -
Ceruzzi, Paul -
Dave Walden -
James Sumner -
Magnus Boman -
Marc Weber -
Mounier Kuhn -
Willard McCarty