Happy Birthday, Alan Turing

How time flies. It was two years ago today that I blogged this: http://blog.jgc.org/2009/06/alan-turing-deserves-apology-fro... which lead to great things: http://blog.jgc.org/2009/09/hello-john-its-gordon-brown.html

No doubt.

I sometimes think we fail to pay enough credit to the early pioneers of the computing field. I was recently reading the "Artificial Life" book by Levy[1], and it starts off with a lot of history about Von Neumann, Turing, and a host of other characters. Fascinating stuff, and that definitely has nudged me to try and make some time to do more reading about the "early days" of computing.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Life-Frontier-Computers-Bio...

A good day to pick up a copy of Cryptonomicon and start reading it.

Computing Machinery and Intelligence [aka "the Touring Test"]

http://orium.homelinux.org/paper/turingai.pdf