A book from Alan Turing and a mysterious piece of paper
blog.stephenwolfram.com
blog.stephenwolfram.com
I am far enough away from that part of my life, I apologize for not being able to give a more detailed and convincing testimonial for this book.
I don't know where to start looking, but there's the book (in the original English) for any interested.
Edit: a better scan, of the 1st ed: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.177580
What does this mean?
In modern times, the Y combinator has been made famous by the Y Combinator startup accelerator, named that way by Paul Graham (who had been a longtime enthusiast of functional programming and the LISP programming language—and had written an early web store using it) because (as he once told me) “nobody understands the Y combinator”. (Needless to say, Y Combinator is all about avoiding having companies go to fixed points…)
There's a direct train from Paddington, iirc. UK people please fill in.
Go on a weekday morning and you’ll be there in 40m.
An on-site museum of the WW2 Enigma code breaking activities, where they happened. This is where Alan Turing worked. Live demonstrations of the 1940s eras computer "bombes".
But, perhaps, most of all:
A chance to visit a historic site.. the activities there could very well have decided the outcome of WW2.
There's also a neat live retrocomputing display of early home computers. And it also happens to be a very lovely area to hang around in - nice buildings, park areas, ponds etc.
Bletcheley has a far, far better discussion about Turing and his influence, and far better displays of the Code Breaking work, along with the associated machines.
I last went to the Science Museum about 5 years ago and all the precision models were gone - some of which were so clever and detailed they should have been exhibits in their own right. Just a couple of hints that they once had extreme skill in model making are left. A good chunk of the multimedia and electronic displays and "experiences" were dysfunctional in some way, and a lot of the classic topics had exhibits that appeared simply worn out. The basement "scientific art exhibition" was about 5 token exhibits in a space the size of a football field, and a few dozen people finding somewhere quiet to sit and eat their sandwiches. The top floor (I think) was the for children interactive, sponsored experience. More was broken than not. The cafe with eye-watering prices seemed the most recent and best maintained exhibit.
I was so disappointed - so were the people we took, for whose benefit we made the trip at all. Manchester MSI is far better at being a science museum nowadays. Have to start to wonder if my extreme love of the place in the 60s-90s stems as much from nostalgia and rose-tinted specs. It's deeply sad, and should be criminal, that it's been allowed to decline that far - it was once a world renowned national asset.
I have to admit a deep sadness at the recent closure of the old Wellcome collection on the fourth and fifth floor; this gallery had been left largely unchanged in several decades, but it had a powerfully evocative atmosphere. It was nearly always empty (hence the understandable decision to close it) and was poorly signposted from the rest of the museum, so it felt almost like urban exploration, creeping through a once-cherished but now abandoned site. By the passage of time, it had become a sort of meta-museum, presenting a historical perspective on the history of medicine. The galleries have been preserved for posterity by Google, but pictures can't really capture the feeling of stepping into a museum that is itself a museum exhibit.
https://artsandculture.google.com/streetview/science-museum-...
I imagine budget for proper replacement displays, modelling, maintenance and restoration is far harder than it used to be... Some of those exceptionals, both known and lesser known in storage, deserve far more than they now often get.
> recent closure of the old Wellcome collection ... powerfully evocative atmosphere
Ugh. That hard to define atmosphere is the part that seems to being modernised away, and a good part of what I increasingly miss. Whether it's too many "clean" experiences with acres of empty space and a few exhibits spotted around, or the changing nature of the interactive models I'm not sure. Certainly I think a lot of the screen based stuff would be better as interactive experience on the website than in the building, though when it's additional to other means, it can often work.
I wish a lot more of how they managed was additive rather than replacing great swathes with a whole new design. Most, though not all, of the new plastic and electronic approaches seem far poorer in terms of lasting, and often less engaging.
The parts I often enjoy most are the esoteric, failed but promising ideas, and the day-to-day that we forgot. So I like the odd little packed displays of thirties electricals, analogue computers,
> By the passage of time, it had become a sort of meta-museum
This is one unexplored area they could do so much more with. Beautiful teak and brass cabinets with a perfect cutaway replica of a steam turbine or whole power station might not be the modern way to do it, but they were lasting and beautiful of themselves. 8 or 10 year old me couldn't leave the place until I'd turned every handle. :)
I'm sure there's scope for a huge, and fascinating self-referential meta-museum of presenting museum science, model making and all the other back room activities through the ages. Include some of the long forgotten exhibits that included the scent of machine oil, carbon electrical brushes, the metallic bite of a little ozone and sprinkling of burnt dust - like all machinery used to come with. Oh, and a selection of those ancient models the kids can try, and fail, to break by winding too fast.
Maybe we need a museum of the museum - maybe that's V&A's territory. :)
I just hope that now Manchester Science and Industry are under the same group it brings the London Science Museum up, rather than Manchester down.
The contrasts are striking.
Interesting tidbit there.
What i mention as theory is that some claim that is the direct cause of his death. Nobody will know for sure.
> it's an openly debated topic, ranging from a simple accident to bullying by the state and conspiracy theories.
> it's an openly debated topic, ranging from a simple accident to bullying by the state or other kinds of conspiracy theories.
How would you say it?
the link: [1] the first automatic switch was introduced in 1922; so they had the fascinating problem of interoperation between manual switched regions and automatic ones. So that Oxford might have had it either way.
[1] https://www.btplc.com/Thegroup/BTsHistory/1912to1968/1922.ht...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavender_scare
I’m not an expert on the topic at all, but the story always seemed fishy to me. Who kills themself by injecting an apple with poison and eating an apple?
(The JFK story also seems fishy to me because I don’t get why in the world Jack Ruby killed Oswald)
> “The writing style is entirely different. Personality-wise, the writer of sample B has a quicker, more intuitive thinking style than the one of sample A.”
How can anybody of Wolfram's intelligence unquestioningly accept this nonsense?
A coworker once told me that his chiropractor told him he could help him with hemroids. This not only made me dubious about her ability to cure hemroids. It made me dubious that she could do anything about back pain. Capable people don't spew nonsense within the scope of their capabilities.
The second his analyst registered an opinion about the personality of the writer I became dubious that she could even tell who wrote it.
Ignore the personality assessment element. Wolfram sought to identify whose handwriting the note was, so he asked a "professional handwriting examiner" that he happened to know. The quote you extracted was her relaying her opinion that the note was not written by Turing.
Similar to other personality-related pseudopseudosciences, there's enough contradicting research to form any opinion (or, more commonly, to support your pre-existing one) [1] [2].
I think the popularity of this method is mainly the result of Forer effect [0]
[1] https://sci-hub.se/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/019188699290220J?via%3Dihub
[2] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3af1/3afd31c55f87c2b1871afe6fc6633e2a2df0.pdf
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effectAs long as you still understand it he succeeded in using it to communicate, and with some people that's a lot better than them not communicating at all because they have to use someone else's language.
If someone comes up with an amazing construct in an invented language and gets any outside eyeballs on it that can understand it, someone will transcribe it into a more common notation anyways.
If you asked Stephen Wolfram what time it was, he would be arrogant and self-promotional, and mention Mathematica at least as much as the time.
When in Rome, do what the Romans do. Given his previous career as a particle physicist I doubt he has any issues with it
https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/what-is-spacetime-re...
> So, OK, if I mounted a project to try to find the fundamental theory of physics, what would I actually do? It’s a complex project, that’ll need not just me, but a diverse team of talented other people too.
It's illuminating that, in order to explore the nature of space and time, he mentions Euclid, Einstein, but most of all himself and his work. The self-absorption encompasses all of existence.
That said, dismissing all of his writing as "arrogant content marketing blogspam" feels uncharitable and too reductive - I don't disagree, but still consider it arrogant self-promotion of the highest order, by one of the most productive and insightful thinkers of our time.
"feels uncharitable and too reductive"
I'm old enough to remember when the law suits, a flagged throwaway comment briefly mentions, were going - my recollection is of a lengthy effort to deprive the other developers of the fruits of Mathematica labours. That colours later impressions. Charitable isn't necessarily always the right take...
Still, that's an aside here, and perhaps I was too sweeping. It's difficult as there are rare times, like this one, where the topic is fascinating and well explored, and the self-promotion is, for Stephen, light touch. It's well known he was a child prodigy, so I'm sure many people and events had part in boosting his ego and innate sense of exceptionalism, resulting in the personality we know. So I don't entirely blame him for it...
"arrogant self-promotion of the highest order, by one of the most productive and insightful thinkers of our time."
You're not wrong. He'd probably be well served employing someone to bring a lighter touch, via an editing pass to all output. I end up not finishing articles he writes on topics I might otherwise find hugely interesting. Solely because too much prose is spent telling me he's brilliant, rather than simply showing it. For me at least, the style of delivery has cost the message - as I stopped regularly reading him as far too frustrating, ages ago. :)
However, I am impressed with the tenacity it took to trace the paper to its origin and there's a lot of interesting story in the process.
It's just a pity that its grammar/syntax is unintuitive to people who come from conventional programming languages.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_multi-paradigm_p...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=wolfram%20derangement%20syndro...
All personalities aside, I feel like the core thesis of this and other books on CAs, fractals, computational physics, etc., are sort of like the edges of some higher scientific theory that we don't yet understand. The entire universe looks like a big fractal with structures repeating with some variation at different scales, and we don't "get" this beyond hand-wavey pure speculation that starts sounding like New Age babble. I wonder if we're just at the edge of being smart enough to grasp this higher order of understanding and if we did we'd have among other things a unified theory of physics. It makes me think of what chimpanzees might feel when we try to teach them language and basic mathematics. They can almost get it.
Maybe there are beings out there that "get it" and they're out there doing things that to us would be indistinguishable from magic.
He's an interesting guy, a good businessman, and I enjoy reading his anecdotes, but I kinda figure he gets about the right amount of credit for his achievements.
If you mean "new kind of science" for example -I think he got about what he deserved on that.
Putting that aside; computer guys seem to think "computability" is important in physics. I don't. The strong Church Turing thesis is an ideological idea, not a physical one. In fact, it is an ideological idea with very little evidence in its favor either in computer science or in the world of matter.
Computable physics would be extremely useful. Even with coarse approximations you can only integrate the Schrödinger equation among hundreds of particles. So you can't do accurate computational biochemistry except maybe one small molecule at a time.
This is wrong. You would have to additionally prove that the other thing is the only alternative.
Also, CA is not testable in the sense that the theory of relativity is testable. The latter makes measurable predictions that can be satisfied, the former does not. I can imagine any model - unicorns and fairies included - and say that is behaves like the universe. The only way to falsify my claim is to empirically contradict one of my claims. NKS does not put forth such claims. Not the kind you would build a new CERN for.
A CA theory of physics would just be math, right? Wouldn't it end up being isomorphic with some mathematical representation, albeit perhaps easier to understand or evaluate in its CA form?
>"If we find a completely different way of computing [the universe]"
We can only compute models of the universe. If a model apparently never contradicts our observations of the universe, then we lazily identify the universe with the model within casual contexts, but we don't actually take that as Absolute Truth. Thus, within appropriate contexts, we might speak as if the "forces" of Newton are actual platonic things, as if the arrows in a freshman physics textbook actually exist and could poke you in the eye. But they don't, they are merely a model.
So, suppose we discover tomorrow a new equation which seems to match all observations, and which we can formally prove transcends CAs. Well, we'll never know whether or not tomorrow we'll find an instance where that new equation breaks down, and has to be replaced by an updated equation which IS computable by CAs. Thus, your supposed "test" is not a test at all.
>Computable physics would be extremely useful. Even with coarse approximations you can only integrate the Schrödinger equation among hundreds of particles
You seem to be confusing "computable" with "efficiently computable" or something. A function can be computable but still be prohibitively expensive to compute.
Current physics models (integrating the Schrödinger equation) aren't computable even in principle, because they involve infinite continuous vector spaces. So a CA model is a theoretical breakthrough because it's computable, even if it's not efficient.
Numerically integrating the Schrödinger equation scales exponentially in the number of quantum states, while the CAs proposed in NKS only scale with the volume of space, so there is some size of system where it'll beat numerical integration.
Yeah, undoubtedly, but that has nothing to do with it being true.
Wolfram doesn't make the case, at all, that it might be true, nor does he suggest any reason a CA might be a better model than the Schroedinger equation, or a way of searching for CA oriented models. The fact that modeling physical equations is difficult on a Turing machine is probably telling you something interesting about nature, rather than telling you to dispose of equations as models of reality.
The whole thing is about as useful as Tipler's idea that God is a supercomputer at the end of the universe. Maybe thought provoking for certain kinds of people, but not helpful at all in the business of figuring out how the universe works, or useful things to do on a computer. It's basically an exotic form of science fiction with a higher than average cognitive load.
Can you describe the process you use to easily judge the value of such conjectures? I'm at a loss of how that would be done since, even though a conjecture might not be testable easily, it might still end up being true.
Even if not completely true, it might in some sense be close enough to inspire new ways of thinking that ultimately lead to the correct solution. For this reason, I'm wary of premature dismissal of "wacky" ideas.
> Putting that aside; computer guys seem to think "computability" is important in physics. I don't.
Taking a step back, the very ability to realize computational systems in physical systems seems very peculiar and interesting in itself, in the same way that noticing how peculiar it is that mathematics is able to describe such a large portion (all?) of physics. It then seems natural to ask oneself whether any physical system could then be considered to model some computation, which would make the connection bidirectional. I do not consider this observation to be that ludicrous nor exclusive to the computer guys.
Example, recording private phone calls and releasing them to the public or releasing those to lawyers when he feels they might serve his purpose.
Creepy and borderline dangerous. But for the average Joe all this seems to be enjoyable.