description: British mathematician, contributions to computer science and AI
383 results
by Maximilian Kasy · 15 Jan 2025 · 209pp · 63,332 words
question. Attempts to address it tend to open a philosophical can of worms, which leads to difficult debates about terms such as understanding and consciousness. Alan Turing, one of the founders of the field of computer science, proposed a solution that aimed to sidestep these philosophical questions. In a fatefully influential paper
by Sinclair McKay · 24 May 2010 · 351pp · 107,966 words
– and quirky – individuals of their generation. Not only were there long-standing cryptographers of great genius; there were also fresh, brilliant young minds, such as Alan Turing, whose work was destined to shape the coming computer age, and the future of technology. Also at Bletchley Park were thousands of dedicated people, mostly
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neat moustache – swiftly proved to be an assiduous, enthusiastic and fantastically ambitious recruiting officer. The most talented young mathematician of them all, 27-year-old Alan Turing, from King’s College, Cambridge, had been sounded out even earlier, as far back as 1937. Between them, Turing and Welchman would quickly prove to
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tragic figure.’ That is one view. Certainly his life was short, and it ended extremely unhappily. But in a number of other senses, Alan Turing was an inspirational figure. ‘Alan Turing was unique,’ recalled Peter Hilton. ‘What you realise when you get to know a genius well is that there is all the difference
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as that. Thanks to biographies, an official apology from the government and the Prime Minister, and even a play by Hugh Whitemore, the name of Alan Turing has become, above all others, synonymous with the breaking of the Enigma codes. Like Dilly Knox, Turing had attended Cambridge, though by the 1930s the
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.’ Directly outside the front door of the house was a path that led, both left and right, to various huts. Mrs Gallilee recalls often seeing Alan Turing ‘walking along the path – intense – always looking worried. People thought he was a bit of a weirdo.’ The front lawn of the house was
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all the correspondence, and whoever got the key out that day shared it. That went on right up until the fall of France.’ Elsewhere, Alan Turing had been quietly busy upon his own researches. And by December 1939, quite independently of Knox and his new Polish friends, he managed to break
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The telephone exchange was in the ballroom. The Naval Section, for a while, had to find a temporary home in the library. For Dilly Knox, Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, sanctuary was found in the Cottage. By this time, Turing, then just turned twenty-eight, was already at work on the design
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from Elmers School] to learn about the machines. c) Twinn is still very keen and not afraid of work. Knox’s attitude towards the young Alan Turing was more ambivalent: He is very difficult to anchor down. He is very clever but quite irresponsible and throws out a mass of suggestions of
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point out, was extremely unattractive; was it really sensible to cram people engaged in the most sensitive cerebral work together in this way? Though Alan Turing sometimes slept in the Cottage, Dilly Knox would make his way back to his own home in the Chilterns, while from the start senior personnel
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she did not want me to do likewise.3 For Captain Jerry Roberts, who joined the Park later to work on Colossus, the successor to Alan Turing’s bombe machine, life in a billet meant that any romantic possibilities were frequently smothered with a cold, damp towel: ‘It was difficult to
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there was the ‘Zygalski sheet’ system devised by the Poles who had originally broken into Enigma, and updated and modified at Bletchley by John Jeffreys, Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman. The updated versions were known as ‘Netz’ or Jeffreys Sheets. Of great help to Bletchley was Dilly Knox hitting upon the principle
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crucial involvement of the Polish codebreakers, Bletchley Park’s first break into current military Enigma traffic – as opposed to old messages – came in January 1940. Alan Turing had been sent to Paris to confer with the Poles about such matters as wheel changes in the Enigma machine, taking with him some of
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days, they managed to crack an Enigma key via this method. One of the Polish mathematicians, Marian Rejewski, remembered his dealings with Turing: ‘We treated Alan Turing as a younger colleague who had specialised in mathematical logic and was just starting out in cryptology.’7 At the time, he was not aware
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the unrelenting pressure was behind an explosive row between Dilly Knox and Alistair Denniston. For reasons of security, Denniston had been extremely reluctant to let Alan Turing travel to Paris with the Zygalski sheets; Knox, on the other hand, felt that aid and assistance to the Polish and French cryptographers was a
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dramatically. And it was Welchman, rather than the veteran Knox, who made representations to Alistair Denniston and his deputy Edward Travis. Welchman was also helping Alan Turing with the development of the bombes. He was clearly a young man with a colossal amount of energy and enthusiasm. The early months of the
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machine’s code wheels. Bletchley thus discovered that the naval Enigma was using a choice of eight code wheels. The Hut 8 codebreakers, led by Alan Turing, realised that they faced several colossal problems. Not only were the naval Enigma operators more disciplined than their counterparts in the army, tending to make
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challenge the Park faced. Of course, the other Huts also faced the problem of getting regular breaks into Enigma keys. While work proceeded painstakingly on Alan Turing’s reinvention of the Polish ‘bombas’ – machines that could check off hundreds of combinations at top speed – the terrible pressure on senior individuals remained.
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figures who evokes the fondest and most vivid memories, even in people who did not work directly alongside him. This is probably because Wilson (like Alan Turing) made few attempts to disguise his homosexuality, or to tone down his colourful manner. ‘Angus Wilson was as queer as a coot,’ says Sarah
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afoot. And for others at Bletchley Park, this was precisely the reason why they seemed not to become quite so highly strung. For instance, Alan Turing’s biographer Andrew Hodges throws intriguing light on the way that many of the ‘boffins’ may have viewed this branch of war work: Nor was
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who was destined to become the oracle of Bletchley’.1 The machine’s origins were more prosaic, although inspiration had its place in their development. Alan Turing had, among other attributes, a tremendous gift for building things from scratch. When it came to electrical experiments, he was the master of what
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who started each communication with a list of names for which it was intended. However, the first breaks into a new key were very difficult. Alan Turing’s friend – and briefly, fiancée – Joan Murray worked specifically on naval Enigma and made much use of Victory early in 1940. The messages that
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was made in the design of the bombe machines. This time the credit went to Gordon Welchman, as Andrew Hodges described in his biography of Alan Turing: ‘on studying the Turing bombe design, he saw that it failed to exploit Enigma weakness to the full … Welchman not only saw the possibility
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the Germans don’t mean you to read their stuff, and I don’t suppose you ever will.’ However, from these tables, and other data, Alan Turing calculated a new method into the codes, which became termed ‘Banburismus’ – in essence, as his Hut 8 colleague and sometime fiancée Joan Murray recalled,
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not a single sighting of a convoy’.2 In the midst of these events, Joan Murray gave a short description of Alan Turing, and his own gentle abstraction. ‘I can remember Alan Turing coming in as usual for a day’s leave,’ she wrote, ‘doing his own mathematical research at night, in the
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own gear … all service cups, saucers and spoons are to be returned to the kitchen by Tuesday 13th Feb.’3 Among his many eccentricities, Alan Turing was known to chain his tea mug firmly to a radiator. According to Andrew Hodges, people would then pick the lock and steal the mug
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operation was moved to the purpose-built canteen, and the library inside the big house. Occasionally there were transgressions, such as the time when Alan Turing established a barrel of cider in the corner of Hut 4, and was informed in unambiguous terms that it was not to stay there. Others
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brought to rest as Churchill paused on the threshold to make his farewells.2 Churchill’s tour also took him into Hut 8, to meet Alan Turing; according to his biographer Andrew Hodges, Turing was ‘very nervous’. The Prime Minister then gave a short address outside Hut 6 to a group
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did not mean you to take me seriously.’ Just one month later, perhaps emboldened by the great honour of that visit, Welchman, together with Alan Turing, Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry, wrote directly to the Prime Minister to make a special plea for more staff. In the first couple of
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and attempting to hit targets – was a cause for irritation, especially when such exercises got in the way of valuable thinking time. Others, however – including Alan Turing – found such duties and manoeuvres amusing and diverting. But the notion that it was compulsory goes to the heart of one of Bletchley Park’s
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There were extra recruits coming in; the brilliant young mathematician Shaun Wylie, for instance, arrived in 1941. His recruitment had in part to do with Alan Turing; for the two men had met in the late 1930s at Princeton University. A formidable intellect, Wylie was also an excellent hockey player. He joined
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the section.19 But even with these and a great many other physical discomforts, the institution was running with great efficiency. Hugh Alexander, who succeeded Alan Turing as Head of Hut 8 in 1941, was a formidable and rather frightening intellect. He was also something of a heart-throb with the ladies
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Meanwhile, historian Roland Oliver fell headlong for Caroline Linehan. But perhaps the most poignant relationship at Bletchley Park – not to say the most unexpected – involved Alan Turing. In the summer of 1940, a mathematician called Joan Clarke (later Murray), who had been studying at Cambridge, was recruited to Hut 8. By the
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of the Purple machine. No matter that Bletchley Park had sent the Americans detailed documents about Enigma and the cracking thereof, and even parts of Alan Turing’s notes on the same; what the Americans wanted was a bombe machine. And British Intelligence, as well as Alistair Denniston, was determined that
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give up its bombes, it tried to help the Americans in various other ways. In November 1942, for instance, it sent the United States Alan Turing in person. He crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth at a time when all such shipping was intensely vulnerable to the all-pervasive menace
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Of course, Britain had its own agents out in the field, and its own elaborate plans for counter-espionage coups. One came in 1940, when Alan Turing and Peter Twinn had still to crack the impossibly complicated naval Enigma. A young lieutenant-commander from Naval Intelligence came to Bletchley Park to discuss
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secret information being revealed. Unfortunately, the weather conditions and other circumstances were never quite right for ‘Operation Ruthless’, it seemed, and eventually it was shelved. Alan Turing and Peter Twinn apparently looked like ‘undertakers cheated of a nice corpse’ at the news.6 This scheme aside, Fleming would be a regular sight
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into Enigma, Knox was extremely watchful, and also on occasion fiercely scornful. But he was no Luddite. According to Penelope Fitzgerald, Knox was fond of Alan Turing, whose Asperger tendencies were in no way reined in at Bletchley. The playwright Hugh Whitemore, in Breaking the Code, added a further, speculative layer, hinting
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are some who argue that the name should be known in every household – for, they believe, he was the man who realised the dreams of Alan Turing and truly brought the computer age into being. In 1943, Bletchley Park had seen the establishment of a new section known as ‘The Newmanry’.
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machinery to codebreaking work. It had been Professor Newman who in the 1930s, with his lectures on ‘mechanical approaches’ to solving mathematical problems, first led Alan Turing to start pondering on the idea of ‘Turing Machines’. Indeed, Newman had lectured Turing directly. Newman, born in 1897, was a very popular figure at
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orders from the Führer himself. The breakthrough on this complex system was made by a young chemist/mathematician called W.T. Tutte. In the meantime Alan Turing, having returned from several months in the USA, eagerly dived into discussions on the subject, having spent his voyage back reading up on the science
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huge amount of strain on electronic valves, which repeatedly failed. But in the course of the many in-depth three-way discussions between Professor Newman, Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers that took place in order to improve the machines, what was debated was the feasibility of what was, in essence, the
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probing the various uses of electronics, a science very much in its infancy. Several years later, the matter of electronics would also come to fascinate Alan Turing at Trinity College, Cambridge. The two men met for the first time at Bletchley Park in 1939. Flowers had been asked along by his
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it, were to contribute to his tragic – and wholly pointless – death. The transition from war to peace seemed, initially, to make little difference to Alan Turing’s working life. After his removal as head of Hut 8 and his return from the United States, he came back to intense research. But
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… ‘Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind … it is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.’ Quite so. In this
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hadn’t been a war – might have been commonplace in Oxford or Cambridge, and which otherwise she would never have seen. ‘Like, for instance, Alan Turing,’ recalls Mimi. ‘All of my memories of him are of seeing him walking along the path and turning left at Hut 9, always with his
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was a gesture, certainly, and came fast on the news of the Park’s lottery grant, and also of the government’s posthumous apology to Alan Turing. But a commemorative badge is not quite the same as a medal. One Bletchley veteran, during the course of the research for this book,
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6 Memo from Dilly Knox, National Archives 7 Welchman, The Hut Six Story 8 Aileen Clayton, The Enemy Is Listening (Hutchinson, 1980) 9 Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing – The Enigma (Burnett Books, 1983) 10 Gwen Watkins, Cracking the Luftwaffe Codes (Greenhill, 2006) 10 1940: The Coming of the Bombes 1 Captain Frederick
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Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret (Purnell Books, 1974) 2 Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing, The Enigma (Burnett Books, 1983) 3 F.H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp, Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park (Oxford University Press, 1993) 4 Memo
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Relationship 1 Michael Howard, Times Literary Supplement, autumn 2009 2 Barbara Abernethy, talking to Michael Smith, Station X (Channel Four Books, 1998) 3 Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing – The Enigma (Burnett Books, 1983) 4 Peter Calvocoressi, Top Secret Ultra (Cassell, 1980) 5 Telford Taylor, essay in F.H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp,
by James Gleick · 1 Mar 2011 · 855pp · 178,507 words
,’ to leave behind the given, to represent the transcendent, yet, as is self-evident, only in symbols.”♦ In 1943 the English mathematician and code breaker Alan Turing visited Bell Labs on a cryptographic mission and met Shannon sometimes over lunch, where they traded speculation on the future of artificial thinking machines. (“Shannon
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hopes that these tracks will meet. —Jon Barwise (1986)♦ AT THE HEIGHT OF THE WAR, in early 1943, two like-minded thinkers, Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, met daily at teatime in the Bell Labs cafeteria and said nothing to each other about their work, because it was secret.♦ Both men had
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themselves. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace lay near the beginning of this tradition, though they were all but forgotten, and now the trail led to Alan Turing, who did something really outlandish: thought up a machine with ideal powers in the mental realm and showed what it could not do. His machine
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be proved nor disproved from within the system, it might conceivably be decided, as it were, by an outside referee—by external logic or rules.♦♦ Alan Turing, just twenty-two years old, unfamiliar with much of the relevant literature, so alone in his work habits that his professor worried about his becoming
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logic of his own mind. He imagined himself as a computer. He distilled mental procedures into their smallest constituent parts, the atoms of information processing. Alan Turing and Claude Shannon had codes in common. Turing encoded instructions as numbers. He encoded decimal numbers as zeroes and ones. Shannon made codes for genes
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Mark I. In Britain, still secret, the code breakers at Bletchley Park had gone on to build a vacuum-tube computing machine called the Colossus. Alan Turing was beginning work on another, at the University of Manchester. When the public learned about these machines, they were naturally thought of as “brains.” Everyone
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fundamental unit is a choice, and it is binary. “It is the least event that can be true or false.”♦ They also managed to attract Alan Turing, who published his own manifesto with a provocative opening statement—“I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’ ”♦—followed by a sly admission that
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which they are neatly sorted. The orderly states have low probability and low entropy. For impressive degrees of orderliness, the probabilities may be very low. Alan Turing once whimsically proposed a number N, defined as “the odds against a piece of chalk leaping across the room and writing a line of Shakespeare
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thermodynamic system, operating a piston in a cylinder of fluid. He pointed out that this device would need, in effect, “a sort of memory faculty.” (Alan Turing was now, in 1929, a teenager. In Turing’s terms, Szilárd was treating the mind of the demon as a computer with a two-state
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nature being nothing more than phonetic and photogenic structures.♦ The universe, which others called a library or an album, then came to resemble a computer. Alan Turing may have noticed this first: observing that the computer, like the universe, is best seen as a collection of states, and the state of the
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L. Bell, “Hermann Weyl on Intuition and the Continuum,” Philosophia Mathematica 8, no. 3 (2000): 261. ♦ “SHANNON WANTS TO FEED NOT JUST DATA”: Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (London: Vintage, 1992), 251. ♦ “OFF AND ON … I HAVE BEEN WORKING”: Letter, Shannon to Vannevar Bush, 16 February 1939, in Claude Elwood Shannon
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WORK: Shannon interview with Robert Price: “A Conversation with Claude Shannon: One Man’s Approach to Problem Solving,” IEEE Communications Magazine 22 (1984): 125; cf. Alan Turing to Claude Shannon, 3 June 1953, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. ♦ “NO, I’M NOT INTERESTED IN DEVELOPING A POWERFUL BRAIN”: Andrew Hodges
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Enigma (London: Vintage, 1992), 251. ♦ “A CONFIRMED SOLITARY”: Max H. A. Newman to Alonzo Church, 31 May 1936, quoted in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing, 113. ♦ “THE JUSTIFICATION … LIES IN THE FACT”: Alan M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society
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, in Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, vol. 5, ed. Solomon Feferman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 147. ♦ “YOU SEE … THE FUNNY LITTLE ROUNDS”: letter from Alan Turing to his mother and father, summer 1923, AMT/K/1/3, Turing Digital Archive, http://www.turingarchive.org. ♦ “IN ELEMENTARY ARITHMETIC THE TWO-DIMENSIONAL CHARACTER
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and Pattern (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 535. ♦ “IT USED TO BE SUPPOSED IN SCIENCE”: “The Nature of Spirit,” unpublished essay, 1932, in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing, 63. ♦ “ONE CAN PICTURE AN INDUSTRIOUS AND DILIGENT CLERK”: Herbert B. Enderton, “Elements of Recursion Theory,” in Jon Barwise, Handbook of Mathematical Logic (Amsterdam: North
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Holland, 1977), 529. ♦ “A LOT OF PARTICULAR AND INTERESTING CODES”: Alan Turing to Sara Turing, 14 October 1936, quoted in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing, 120. ♦ “THE ENEMY KNOWS THE SYSTEM BEING USED”: “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems” (1948), in Claude Elwood Shannon, Collected Papers
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“Avoiding All Personal Enquiries” of Molecules (London: Associated University Presses, 1995), 205. ♦ “THE ODDS AGAINST A PIECE OF CHALK”: Quoted by Andrew Hodges, “What Did Alan Turing Mean by ‘Machine,’?” in Philip Husbands et al., The Mechanical Mind in History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 81. ♦ “AND YET NO WORK HAS BEEN
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Clare. “Seventeenth Century Calculating Machines.” Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation 1:1 (1943): 27–28. Aspray, William. “From Mathematical Constructivity to Computer Science: Alan Turing, John Von Neumann, and the Origins of Computer Science in Mathematical Logic.” PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1980. ———. “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A
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, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, or, the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth, Eclesiasticall and Civill. London: Andrew Crooke, 1660. Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. London: Vintage, 1992. Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979. ———. Metamagical Themas: Questing for the
by Jane Smiley · 18 Oct 2010 · 253pp · 80,074 words
v3.1 Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two faculties, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. —Alan Turing, “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals,” 1939 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Epigraph Introduction Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter
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story can only be told in the context of other stories, because in that December of 1937, others too were pondering the difficulties of calculation. Alan Turing, a visiting fellow at Princeton, was wondering if the Liverpool tide-predicting machine, a system of pulleys and gears used to measure and predict tides
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of machine, and the genius of each was idiosyncratically formed by temperament, education, family history, by restrictions as well as by opportunities. In some ways, Alan Turing was Atanasoff’s precise opposite, drawn to pure mathematics rather than practical physics, educated to think rather than to tinker, disorganized in his approach rather
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that he once again could not accept. In 1929, when John Vincent Atanasoff was working on his PhD in physics at the University of Wisconsin, Alan Turing, seventeen (born June 23, 1912), was sitting for his Higher School Certificate examination. The examiner who evaluated his mathematics paper wrote, “He appeared to lack
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by the other boys. He tried to continue chemistry experiments there, but this was doubly hated, as showing a swottish mentality, and producing nasty smells.” Alan Turing was from long lines of inventive people on his mother’s side and his father’s side, and he showed a ready and determined fascination
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was moving in the wrong direction—toward greater and greater abstraction—while physicists continued to be interested in concrete problems. In the meantime, Alan Turing was wrestling with similar dissatisfactions. Alan Turing’s life at Sherborne was punctuated at the end with tragedy—in the winter of his last year (1930), his dearest friend
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that no longer interested Atanasoff. To many mathematicians of the period, the Entscheidungsproblem seemed to point toward concepts that were psychological, epistemological, or even theological. Alan Turing’s answer to the problem was no—there was no algorithm that could determine the truth of every mathematical statement. He was preempted by a
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Machines—offered a bridge, a connection between abstract symbols and the physical world. Indeed, his imagery was, for Cambridge, almost shockingly industrial.” In May 1936, Alan Turing submitted his paper, entitled “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” to the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society and then applied unsuccessfully
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not think like either Atanasoff or Turing. Chapter Three Although Atanasoff made every effort to find out about what calculating machines were being invented, and Alan Turing was as well connected as a mathematician could be, neither one of them was, or perhaps could have been, familiar with Konrad Zuse, an inventor
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—for his senior school project, he had designed a city of the future (à la Fritz Lang’s Metropolis) based on a hexagonal grid. Like Alan Turing, Zuse was educated in a system that focused on a child’s emotional and philosophical life as well as his intellectual life, and at the
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considering the dielectric constant of helium in his PhD dissertation, he was calculating the reduction in electric field strength caused by the presence of helium. Alan Turing was familiar with them, too—when he could make no progress finding the dielectric constant of water—that is, in calculating how effective water is
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was constructed and ready to test within a few months. Once his paper “On Computable Numbers” was completed and published in the spring of 1936, Alan Turing’s world expanded again—by the end of that September, he was at Princeton, enjoying (or not) a graduate fellowship there and meeting some of
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even if it did not work in the real world; Turing disagreed. Turing also began thinking again about the Liverpool tide-predicting machine. The machine Alan Turing was thinking of (and received forty pounds sterling to develop) would use weights and counterweights attached to rotating gears to set up problems. Their solutions
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, Turing went to Bletchley Park to aid in the breaking of the Enigma. Yet another, and still more obscure, inventor of the computer, one whom Alan Turing would soon know very well, was Tommy Flowers. He was an engineer at the General Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in northwest London
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operations. There was, however, another more complex encoding system that the Germans were working with, which the English decoders at Bletchley Park called “Tunny.” When Alan Turing grew famous in the 1980s, almost all of the information concerning the importance of Tunny and its solution at Bletchley Park was still secret. These
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breaking of the Tunny codes at Bletchley Park would shape computer history but would remain top secret until the 1990s, long after the death of Alan Turing and long after most historians and students had come to what turns out to be a misunderstanding of the progress of World War II. Certain
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J. Watson, Jr., later said, “If Aiken and my father had had revolvers they would both have been dead.” Hard feelings lingered for years afterward. Alan Turing is now a famous man—the subject of biographies, papers, an opera, and at least one play, but his work at Bletchley Park breaking the
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. W. Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret, 1974; A. Cave Brown, Bodyguard of Lies, 1975), or in specialized publications that did mention him directly (Brian Randell, “On Alan Turing and the Origins of Digital Computers,” 1972; Brian Randell, editor, The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers, 1973). Various accounts culminated in an episode about
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, the frantic chatter of a motor run, even the ludicrous frenzy of hosts of bogus scores. Flowers invented Colossus, but he also gave credit to Alan Turing for his contribution. At a conference in 1980, Flowers saw a young man reading the book that grew out of the BBC series The Secret
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) Konrad Zuse’s Z1 computer, built in his parents’ Berlin apartment c. 1936. (Courtesy of Horst Zuse) Konrad Zuse, 1910–1995. (Courtesy of Horst Zuse) Alan Turing, 1912–1954, upon his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951. (© National Portrait Gallery, London) Bletchley Park staff at work on deciphering
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later he was given a professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study, along with Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. It was there that he met Alan Turing, to whom he offered the job as research assistant in 1938. Clearly, von Neumann’s personality and biography meshed to produce a man who was
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and—not to be forgotten—the childish laughter of my first son were not exactly conducive to analysing the world into yes/no values.” Like Alan Turing, and at around the same time, Zuse began to think about the nature of the mind, the nature of human free will, and even the
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my part. Little or none of that would have been possible had Colossus been known. One person who, of course, knew all about Colossus was Alan Turing. The end of the war meant that Turing had several options available to him. In June 1945, he received an Order of the British Empire
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had been learned through Colossus without acknowledging that Colossus had ever existed. The third important figure in the Bletchley Park computer story was Max Newman, Alan Turing’s old professor from Cambridge, from whom he had taken a course in the foundations of mathematics in 1935. It was as a result of
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8,” restricting the public relations potential, and therefore sales, of the Manchester computer. EDVAC and UNIVAC dominated the news. In March of the same year, Alan Turing was elected to the Royal Society, but then, in January 1952, Turing met a young man named Arnold Murray. Turing was now almost forty, Murray
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this time, Turing had already reported the burglary. His report alerted the police, who, upon uncovering an illegal homosexual relationship between Turing and Murray, arrested Alan Turing under the draconian Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 (Section 11), which stated that “any male person who, in public or private
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1953, Turing engaged in more travel and more work on his theories of brain as machine/machine as brain. And then, on June 8, 1954, Alan Turing was found by his housekeeper, dead of cyanide poisoning in his house in Manchester, a half-eaten apple by his bedside (he customarily ate an
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the computer, he wanted to steer the conversation toward the benefits of reinventing the alphabet (the reader may view this as an eerie evocation of Alan Turing and the purpose of Colossus). He told a Bulgarian newspaper in 1985, “I hear them; I hear the voices and the hearts of the people
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point of view, he might have taken his vacuum-tube idea and used it to invent a computer, but he also might not have met Alan Turing or Max Newman; the computer he invented would not have been Colossus, but on the other hand, he would not have had to invent it
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saw them work. It does not seem likely, therefore, that they would have switched to electronic machines on their own. Tommy Flowers, Max Newman, and Alan Turing knew what electronics could do—it is possible that the computer industry could have blossomed in England rather than the United States, but even aside
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human history and human character. There was no inventor of the computer who was not a vivid personality, and no two are alike. It is Alan Turing who has captured the imagination of the culture, perhaps because of his brilliant mind and his tragic death, but Konrad Zuse is at least as
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attorney has emphasized”: Ibid., p. 128. 15 “Notorious for his idiosyncrasies”: Wansell, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212910/How-Britain-drove-greatest- genius-Alan-Turing-suicide-just-gay.html. 16 “Before the war”: Hodges, pp. 214–15. 17 “the operation of fifteen U-boats”: Ibid., p. 222. Chapter Six 1
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. 7 “In many ways”: Hodges, p. 438. 8 “transformed his body”: Wansell, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212910/How-Britain-drove-greatest-genius-Alan-Turing-suicide–just-gay.html. Chapter Ten 1 “became paranoid”: Cox, interview, February 22, 2010. 2 “There may have been similar systems”: Eckert, “A Survey of
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, 2006, pp. 78–85. Ginzburg, Ralph. 100 Years of Lynchings. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1988. Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. Leavitt, David. The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006. Macrae, Norman. John von Neumann
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of Logic Based on Ordinals.” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 2, no. 45 (1939): 161–228. Wansell, Geoffrey. “How Britain Drove Its Greatest Genius Alan Turing to Suicide … Just for Being Gay.” Daily Mail, September 12, 2009. Welch, Gregory. “Howard Hathaway Aiken: The Life of a Computer Pioneer.” The Computer Museum
by Simon Singh · 1 Jan 1999
take several large volumes to describe the individual contributions in detail. However, if there is one figure who deserves to be singled out, it is Alan Turing, who identified Enigma’s greatest weakness and ruthlessly exploited it. Thanks to Turing, it became possible to crack the Enigma cipher under even the most
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difficult circumstances. Alan Turing was conceived in the autumn of 1911 in Chatrapur, a town near Madras in southern India, where his father Julius Turing was a member of
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. People think—most people think—that in mathematics we always know what is right and what is wrong. Not so. Not any more.” Figure 47 Alan Turing. (photo credit 4.4) In his attempt to identify undecidable questions, Turing’s paper described an imaginary machine that was designed to perform a particular
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breakthrough soon spread among the other senior cryptanalysts, who recognized that he was a singularly gifted codebreaker. According to Peter Hilton, a fellow Bletchley codebreaker, “Alan Turing was obviously a genius, but he was an approachable, friendly genius. He was always willing to take time and trouble to explain his ideas; but
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-speaking people will remain for a very long time, if not forever. That so few should know exactly what he did is the sad part.” Alan Turing was another cryptanalyst who did not live long enough to receive any public recognition. Instead of being acclaimed a hero, he was persecuted for his
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out of date. Eventually, Max Newman, a Bletchley mathematician, came up with a way to mechanize the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Drawing heavily on Alan Turing’s concept of the universal machine, Newman designed a machine that was capable of adapting itself to different problems, what we today would call a
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revealed during his lifetime, because his work was invaluable to British forces in the Crimea. Instead, credit for the work went to Friedrich Kasiski. Similarly, Alan Turing’s contribution to the war effort was unparalleled, and yet government secrecy demanded that his work on Enigma could not be revealed. In 1987, Ellis
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. Thanks also go to Hugh Whitemore, who gave me permission to use a quote from his play Breaking the Code, based on Andrew Hodges’ book Alan Turing-The Enigma. On a personal note, I would like to thank friends and family who put up with me over the two years while I
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: HMSO, 1975). The authoritative record of intelligence in the Second World War, including the role of Ultra intelligence. Hodges, Andrew, Alan Turing: The Enigma (London: Vintage, 1992). The life and work of Alan Turing. One of the best scientific biographies ever written. Kahn, David, Seizing the Enigma (London: Arrow, 1996). Kahn’s history of
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hopes to be active soon. Bletchley Park http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/ccc/bpark/ The official Web site, which includes opening times and directions. The Alan Turing Homepage http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/ Enigma emulators http://www.attlabs.att.co.uk/andyc/enigma/enigma_j.html http://www.izzy.net/~ian
by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne · 16 May 2011 · 561pp · 120,899 words
very same time practical problem solvers relied on it to deal with real-world emergencies. One spectacular success occurred during the Second World War, when Alan Turing developed Bayes to break Enigma, the German navy’s secret code, and in the process helped to both save Britain and invent modern electronic computers
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that were unanswerable by any other means: the defenders of Captain Dreyfus used it to demonstrate his innocence; insurance actuaries used it to set rates; Alan Turing used it to decode the German Enigma cipher and arguably save the Allies from losing the Second World War; the U.S. Navy used it
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the next year he grew breasts. And on June 7, 1954, the day after the tenth anniversary of the Normandy invasion he helped make possible, Alan Turing committed suicide. Two years later the British government knighted Anthony Blunt, the spy who later admitted tipping off his friends Burgess and Maclean and precipitating
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Bayes’ rule into a respectable form of mathematics and a logical, coherent methodology. The first publication heralding the Bayesian revival was a book by Good, Alan Turing’s wartime assistant. As Good explained, “After the war, he [Turing] didn’t have time to write about statistics because he was too busy designing
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to speak of that but I. J. Good is the principal contributor to the Bayesian group and he was taking that position.”29 Good was Alan Turing’s cryptographic assistant during the Second World War. So did Tukey use Bayes’ rule for decoding for the National Security Agency? And could he have
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Coding Theory and Cryptography: From Enigma and Geheimschreiber to Quantum Theory, ed., WD Joyner. Springer-Verlag. 1–8. Hodges, Andrew. (1983, 2000) Alan Turing: The Enigma. Walker. A classic. ———. The Alan Turing Webpage. http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/. ———. (2000) Turing, a natural philosopher. Routledge. In The Great Philosophers, eds., R. Monk and F
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. Raphael. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ———. (2002) Alan Turing—a Cambridge Scientific Mind. In Cambridge Scientific Minds, eds., Peter Harmon, Simon Mitton. Cambridge University Press. Hosgood, Steven. http://tallyho.bc.nu/~steve/banburismus.html
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. Welchman, Gordon. (1983) The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes. McGraw-Hill. Wiener, Norbert. (1956) I Am a Mathematician. MIT Press. Zabell SL. (1995) Alan Turing and the Central Limit Theorem. American Mathematical Monthly (102:6) 483–94. Chapter 5. Dead and Buried Again Box GEP, Tiao GC. (1973) Bayesian Inference
by Ray Kurzweil · 13 Nov 2012 · 372pp · 101,174 words
in developing a powerful brain. All I’m after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. —Alan Turing A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human
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. —Alan Turing I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will
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be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. —Alan Turing A mother rat will build a nest for her young even if she has never seen another rat in her lifetime.1 Similarly, a spider
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be able to master all of the knowledge on the Web—which is essentially all of the knowledge of our human-machine civilization. English mathematician Alan Turing (1912–1954) based his eponymous test on the ability of a computer to converse in natural language using text messages.13 Turing felt that all
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of neural circuits. The second important idea on which the information age relies is the one I mentioned earlier: the universality of computation. In 1936 Alan Turing described his “Turing machine,” which was not an actual machine but another thought experiment. His theoretical computer consists of an infinitely long memory tape with
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computer could not think creatively and find the key algorithms employed by the brain and then use these to turn a computer into a brain. Alan Turing introduced this goal in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which includes his now-famous Turing test for ascertaining whether or not an AI
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we add more neocortex in a nonbiological form, we can expect ever higher qualitative levels of abstraction. British mathematician Irvin J. Good, a colleague of Alan Turing’s, wrote in 1965 that “the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.” He defined such a machine as one
by Marcus Du Sautoy · 26 Apr 2004 · 434pp · 135,226 words
that would generate this new evidence: the computer. CHAPTER EIGHT Machines of the Mind I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’ Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence Alan Turing’s name will always be associated with the cracking of Germany’s wartime code, Enigma. From the comfort of the country house of
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: Cambridge University Press, 1940) Hardy, G.H., Ramanujan. Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940) Hodges, A., Alan Turing: The Enigma (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1983) Hoffman, P., The Man Who Loved Only Numbers. The story of Paul Erdos and the Search for
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.naturalsciences.be/expo/ishango/en/index.html A chance to see the Ishango bone. http://www.turing.org.uk/ A website maintained by Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing’s biographer. http://www.salon.com/people/feature/1999/10/09/dyson ‘Freeman Dyson: frog prince of physics’, an article by Kristi Coale. Illustration and
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-to-date topics in Stewart’s straightforward style. BOOKS-FICTION Cryptonomicon Neal Stephenson A huge, brilliant novel which hinges on the complex problem of cryptography. Alan Turing appears as a minor character. Contact Carl Sagan An unusual novel by the well-known and far-sighted American astronomer. The book is far superior
by Daniel C. Dennett · 7 Feb 2017 · 573pp · 157,767 words
of life that makes all this possible, we can appreciate a second strange inversion of reasoning, achieved almost a century later by another brilliant Englishman: Alan Turing. Here is Turing’s strange inversion, put in language borrowed from Beverley: IN ORDER TO BE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL COMPUTING MACHINE, IT IS NOT
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of Oak Ridge and GOFAI After seventy years there are still secrets about World War II that have yet to emerge. The heroic achievements of Alan Turing in breaking the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park are now properly celebrated even while some of the details are still considered too sensitive to
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developmental controls to accomplish this redesign do count. 27The Ratio Club, founded in 1949 by the neurologist John Bates at Cambridge University, included Donald MacKay, Alan Turing, Grey Walter, I. J. Good, William Ross Ashby, and Horace Barlow, among others. Imagine what their meetings must have been like! 28Science has hugely expanded
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Ourselves to Expect: The Bayesian Brain as a Projector.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (3): 209–210. —. 2013d. “Turing’s ‘Strange Inversion of Reasoning.’” In Alan Turing: His Work and Impact, edited by S. Barry Cooper and J. van Leeuwen, 569–573. Amsterdam: Elsevier. —. 2014. “Daniel Dennett on Free Will Worth Wanting
by Ananyo Bhattacharya · 6 Oct 2021 · 476pp · 121,460 words
the book in the original German as his prize after winning a school competition.47 ‘Very interesting, and not at all difficult reading’ was how Alan Turing described von Neumann’s classic in a letter to his mother the following year.48 But von Neumann’s book was also the work of
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writing-table in a bathrobe.’6 This was around the time an unkempt young mathematician, eight years his junior, came to von Neumann’s attention. Alan Turing’s first paper, published in April 1935, developed work in von Neumann’s fifty-second, on group theory, which had appeared the previous year. Coincidentally
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. and Westfall, Catherine, 1993, Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hodges, Andrew, 2012, Alan Turing: The Enigma. The Centenary Edition, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Jammer, Max, 1974, The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics: The Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics in Historical Perspective
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von and Morgenstern, Oskar, 1944, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Petzold, Charles, 2008, The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine, Wiley, Hoboken. Poundstone, William, 1992, Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory and the Puzzle
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of Modern Physics, 51 (1979), pp. 863–914. 47. Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics was not translated into English until 1955. 48. Andrew Hodges, 2012, Alan Turing: The Enigma. The Centenary Edition, Princeton University Press, Princeton. 49. Erwin Schrödinger, ‘Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik’, Naturwissenschaften, 23(48) (1935), pp. 807–12
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(2002), pp. 138–56. 6. Garrett Birkhoff, 1958, ‘Von Neumann and Lattice Theory’, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 64 (1958), pp. 50–56. 7. Alan Turing, ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, published in two parts 1936–7, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 42(1) (1937), pp
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Macrae, John von Neumann. 4. Earl of Halsbury, ‘Ten Years of Computer Development’, Computer Journal, 1 (1959), pp. 153–9. 5. Brian Randell, 1972, On Alan Turing and the Origins of Digital Computers, University of Newcastle upon Tyne Computing Laboratory, Technical report series. 6. Quoted in Aspray, John von Neumann and the
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und Physik, 38 (1931), pp. 173–98. 29. Von Neumann, Selected Letters. 30. Any details of Turing’s life are drawn from Andrew Hodges, 2012, Alan Turing: The Enigma. The Centenary Edition, Princeton University Press, Princeton. My brief description of Turing’s paper is abridged from Charles Petzold, 2008, The Annotated Turing
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: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine, Wiley, Hoboken, and ‘Computable Numbers: A Guide’, in Jack B. Copeland (ed.), 2004, The Essential Turing
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Inside the Center, Doubleday, New York and Toronto. 68. Quoted in Macrae, John von Neumann. A charitable view of contemporary Britain, which did not make Alan Turing an earl. He was charged with gross indecency and his security clearance was revoked. 69. J. Robert Oppenheimer Personnel Hearings Transcripts, volume XII, https://www
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