Turing Oversold?

So your argument is, because it is unclear how to "physically implement the arbitrary-function minimization operator", Turing is the better "theoretical backbone" and has founded computer science?

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

But wait a minute, you might say, facts are facts.

And if everyone had the time and resources to discover and digest every fact, your understanding would be the end of it.

But everyone doesn't have time and resources. To compensate, we rely on others to curate facts for us. When we encounter an internally consistent subset of facts that suits our ideals and our interests, we adopt that point of view.

There are infinitely many subsets of curated facts that can be presented as internally consistent. That's why there are so many different points of view.

What bearing does this have on Turing's role in computer science, and his latter day fame in a society which came to be defined by silicone logic?

The First Computers Were Human (and Mostly Women)

https://mjosefweber.medium.com/the-first-computers-were-huma...

Turing, in addition to stating an ontology of computing, dared to invite the question, what is the difference between a computer and a human?

But that downplays her accomplishments too much. She didn't write the "first program" but she was the first to understand what computers would be capable of doing (for example, that by assigning numbers to letters and symbols, computers could do more than simply perform numerical computations), and she was the first to invent foundational control flow structures such as loops and conditionals. Her program was much more rigorously defined and sophisticated than any previous examples.

>The longest program that Menabrea presented was 11 operations long and contained no loops or branches; Lovelace’s program contains 25 operations and a nested loop (and thus branching).

https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-g.htm...

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-t...

https://projectlovelace.net/static_prod/img/Diagram_for_the_...

Ultimately, as always, credit will be assigned by future generations of scientists and historians long after everyone who is alive today has disappeared from the face of the earth. Many disagreements that seem important now will be forgotten. Many findings that seem important now will turn out not be. Many names that are very prominent now will fade into obscurity. As always.

[a] https://people.idsia.ch//~juergen/deep-learning-conspiracy.h...

[b] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/technology/artificial-int...

Harold Abelson points out in one of his lectures [0] that computer science isn't about computers any more than biology is about microscopes.

From that perspective, it is clear that Turing found an existing discipline of computer science and made major contributions to it. But it doesn't really seem right to say that he invented or founded computer science.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J_xL4IGhJA&list=PLE18841CAB...

From TFA:

> There is a seemingly minor difference whose significance emerged only later. Many of Gödel's instruction sequences were series of multiplications of number-coded storage contents by integers. Gödel did not care that the computational complexity of such multiplications tends to increase with storage size. Similarly, Church also ignored the context-dependent spatio-temporal complexity of the basic instructions in his algorithms. Turing and Post, however, adopted a traditional, reductionist, minimalist, binary view of computing. Their machine models permitted only very simple elementary binary instructions with constant complexity, like the early binary machine model of Leibniz (1679)[L79][LA14][HO66] and Zuse's 1936 patent application...

I presume by "seemingly minor" Schmidhuber implies "it turns out to be very important".

There’s also the point (mentioned e.g. by Wadler in his “Propositions as types” talk) that Gödel didn’t actually realize how pervasive universal computation was and actively pushed back against Turing proclaining the equivalence. This is not to accuse him—he wasn’t particularly obstinate or unfair about it and, furthermore, came to understand the idea fairly quickly. But it’s not at all uncommon in science for the one who actually invented a thing to fail to realize what it was that they just invented, and somebody else comes years or in some unfortunate cases decades later and announces the founding of a new area of knowledge on that already-discovered site. Whom the later naming will associate with the discovery is a toss-up, but it’s generally fair and in good taste, I think, to mention both.

Is Lisp such a mechanization?

The Turing machine is a key conceptual model for understanding the basics of computation. The Turing Test is a great model for thinking about what being intelligent means. Hardly a week goes by without the term Turing Complete appearing somewhere in a HN comment. The fact that he also played an important role in the design and construction of actual practical computing machines, and did so to fight nazis seals the deal.

Of course there's more to it, there's plenty of credit to go around, but Turing is the perfect entry point for people to appreciate and learn more about all the work that went into the founding of computer science. It elevates the profile of the whole field.

If there was no narrative, no idols, no celebrities, would people be less motivated to do science? Why do we need to lie to ourselves so?

> If you're already deeply interested in computer science, of course the detailed narrative recognizing dozens of brilliant early computer scientists is richer. Of course!

Personally I'm mostly uninterested in who did what, but maybe that's just me. It seems obvious to me that nearly every scientific discovery could have been done equally well by millions of people, it's just a matter of who had the resources to be educated, who decided to research the problem, who managed to snipe the answer first, and who had the right connections to get it acknowledged. They're still great achievements, for sure, but they're not the markers of exceptional genius we want to think they are, not for Turing or Einstein, but not for anyone at all, really.

But one soon realizes you probably won't get heroic credit even if you do contribute something heroic, neutralizing that encouragement.

Therefore, you'd better do it for the love of the work itself or for how it helps others.

There's no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't mind who gets the credit.

This is always been the case---medieval and renaissance thinkers would publish anagrams of their key findings because they didn't want to give someone else the advantage of knowing the finding but also wanted to prove that they thought of the idea. IIRC, Isaac Newton did not publish any of his findings until someone else threatened to publish their independent results. And he's known as the creator of calculus because the British Royal Society got into an academic slap-fight with the French.

Of late? You should read up on Newton/Leibniz hysterics over who invented calculus. The arguments over who invented the first light bulb, car, etc. Whether greek knowledge ( the foundation of western civilization ) originated in the near east or even in india. Heck, people still argue about who "discovered" america first. There is national, religious, ethnic, racial, gender, sexuality pride tied to "priority". It's not just in science/math, it's applies to everything.

> These figures are supposed to be idolized and idealized

Why? They weren't particularly good people. Neither were saints.

> Achilles elevated Greece by giving Greeks something to collectively aspire to or adulate.

Are you talking about science/knowledge or politics? But you are right on the point. It's what this is all about at the end of the day. Politics.

Without politics, the discovery/knowledge would be what is important. Because of politics, the people become the focal point.

People have had that perched-on-giants feeling for some time:

This concept has been traced to the 12th century, attributed to Bernard of Chartres. Its most familiar expression in English is by Isaac Newton in 1675: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...

Move Newton, Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein 10kms away from where they were born, surround them by a different set of chimps and the story doesnt end the same way.

A good book from Niall Ferguson - the Sqaure and the Tower - makes the case tradionally Historians have studied individuals instead of groups because its easier to collect data on one chimp versus the entire troupe.

Once you start digging you realize that nothing is as simple. For example for physics, "Physics for Poets" by Robert H. March is an eye opener.

I agree with this. It's certainly the case that I wish more people knew of Alonso Church and Kurt Gödel, but you have to realize in a "PR" sense that it's simply not going to be feasible to teach the general public about their contributions.

And Turing's contributions were genuinely ground-breaking, there's a reason that computer science is lousy with concepts named after or by him (Turing machines, Turing-completeness, even the word "computing" was arguably coined in "On Computable Numbers"). He also thought deeply and hard about the philosophical implications to computing in a way that others didn't (the "Turing test" being the obvious example).

In addition: when a mathematically inclined person describes any kind of mathematical concept to laymen, the first question is always "Yeah, but what is that actually useful for?", asked with a certain amount of disdain. With Turing, the answer is powerful: "How about defeating the Nazis and laying the foundation for modern society?". That case is harder to make for Church or Gödel: they obviously didn't work for the GCSE, and "lambda calculus" as a concept is a much more abstract thing than Turing machines, which laymen can readily understand (i.e. it's "just" a computer).

Add to that the fact that Turing's story is not just about computing, or code-breaking, it's also the story of the suffering that society inflicted on gay men. The fact that he was shamed into suicide is just all the more reason to celebrate him now.

I agree with the basic point of the article, but I have no issue with giving Alan Turing this title. He earned it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture

von Neumann simply described the work of Eckert and Mauchly on the ENIAC in a written report. And his name was on the report which made people think that he came up with the idea, which was false. It also resulted in a patent dispute -- it's interesting to imagine what would have happened if the concept had been patented. The book goes into detail on this.

The wikipedia article also talks about Turing machines as a precedent that store data and code in the same place. But ironically I'd say that probably gives him too much credit! I think a large share should go to the people who designed a working machine, because it's easy to say come up with the idea of an airplane; much harder to make it work :) And to me it seems unlikely that the Turing Machine, which was an idea created to prove mathematical facts, was a major inspiration for the design of the ENIAC.

Finally, even though the author of this web page has his own credit dispute, I appreciate this elaboration on the credit assigned to Turing.

So, Founding Fathers of computing science becomes mixed - starting from those low brow thinkers we call journalists - with the idea of Founding Father of computing. And this is not only unfair, but technically wrong.

Originality is easily defined as who did sth first.

This might not be the same as influence of some work. It might be that someone else does a lot of groundbreaking work which actually makes sth work (e.g. Goodfellow et al for GAN). You can say the GAN paper had more influence than Schmidhubers Adversarial Curiosity Principle.

Also, of course some newer authors might not know of all the old work. So it might be that people get the same ideas. So when Goodfellow got the idea for GAN, he might not have known about Schmidhubers Adversarial Curiosity.

The problem is, sometimes people did know about the other original work but intentionally do not cite them. You can not really know. People of course will tell you they did not know. But this can be fixed by just adding the citation. It looks bad of course when there are signs that they should have known, so it was really intentionally.

There is also a lot of arguing when sth is the same idea, or when sth is a different novel idea. This can be ambiguous. But for most cases which are discussed by Schmidhuber, when you look at the core idea, this is actually not so much the case. Also, this is also not so much a problem. There is less argumentation about whether sth is at least related. So this still should be cited then.

The question is then, which work should one cite. I would say all the relevant references. Which is definitely the original work, but then also other influential work. Many people just do the latter. And this is one of the criticism by Schmidhuber, that people do not give enough credit (or no credit) to the original work.

It seemed more like he felt he was unfairly being uncredited. Which is probably why he wrote this - he now cares deeply about giving credit to the right people.

You_again wants his work and that of others properly recognised. For example, his article, titled Critique of Paper by "Deep Learning Conspiracy" (Nature 521 p 436) [1] that is referenced by your link to wikipedia, cites a couple dozen pioneers of deep learning, quite apart from Schmidhuber hismelf. Quoting from it:

>> 2. LBH discuss the importance and problems of gradient descent-based learning through backpropagation (BP), and cite their own papers on BP, plus a few others, but fail to mention BP's inventors. BP's continuous form was derived in the early 1960s (Bryson, 1961; Kelley, 1960; Bryson and Ho, 1969). Dreyfus (1962) published the elegant derivation of BP based on the chain rule only. BP's modern efficient version for discrete sparse networks (including FORTRAN code) was published by Linnainmaa (1970). Dreyfus (1973) used BP to change weights of controllers in proportion to such gradients. By 1980, automatic differentiation could derive BP for any differentiable graph (Speelpenning, 1980). Werbos (1982) published the first application of BP to NNs, extending thoughts in his 1974 thesis (cited by LBH), which did not have Linnainmaa's (1970) modern, efficient form of BP. BP for NNs on computers 10,000 times faster per Dollar than those of the 1960s can yield useful internal representations, as shown by Rumelhart et al. (1986), who also did not cite BP's inventors.

That is not "wanting to be the center of attention". It is very much asking for proper attribution of research results. Failing to do so is a scientific scandal, especially when the work cited has contributed towards a Turing award.

__________

[1] https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-conspiracy.ht...

Since when are movies supposed to be accurate historical references? They are made to be entertaining, so facts get kicked out of the door from Day 1.

Since it wasn't linked, Bombe was based on the Polish Bomba machine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)

  > Polish mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki
  > and Henryk Zygalski who were the first to break the Enigma
  > code

The person who toured us around was telling us a brief story of how the Enigma was broken, starting with Bletchley Park. Me or maybe my friend asked who was the first to break Enigma, and he immediately answered that it was Turing, then noticed our puzzled face expressions, and added something along 'ah.. yeah.. and Polish did some minor work too' :). Just an anecdote.

The vast majority of people working anywhere near mathematics, physical sciences or electrical engineering (the 3 founding pillars of CS) in the 1920s and 1930s probably worked on problems related to WW2 during WW2. You can equally state that motivating claim for a lot of other people.

I think Turing gets the Media Treatment^TM because there's a lot of Tragic Hero Energy in his story:

<A gay man in an era that summarily rejected him [and we tell this story in an era that is extremely oversensitive and hyper-reactive to this particular sort of injustice]; a smart, shy pupil whose closest childhood friend (and suspected lover) died early of a now-extinct illness; a mathematician who dreamed of how numbers and lookup tables could hold a conversation, saw them used and counter-used to destroy cities and murder millions, then was finally rewarded with prison and humiliation by the people he fought for.>

Turing himself off course deserves all praise and glory and the righteous anger for how he was treated in his last years, but I think our era's affinity for him is just the old mechanism of people digging the past for battles that reflect the moral values they're currently (fighting for|winning|losing), see also the misguided claim that Ada Lovelace is the first "computer programmer", usually followed by a looong screed about Women In Tech.

We just like a good story to exaggerate and make it reflect our current moral memes, and the idea of a Man|Woman Ahead Of Their Times is a catch by this standard.

After reading that I sat here for a minute and racked my brain as to who my childhood 'hero' might be. I can't remember a single person.

It's amusing to me how much of intellectual work deals in a currency of status. Getting/giving credit for things appears to be the Prime Directive, at least among the observers. We've now graduated to not only stressing who is responsible but what demographic groups they are a part of.

Now, it could be that the real deal groundbreaking folks don't give a damn. Tip o' the hat to those people.

I think register machines are more intuitive than Turing machines - they are much closer to how real world computers work.

Of course Turing machine is more easy to understand because... it's a theoritical machine, after all. On the other side, lambda calculus was weirder, I didn't get it until learning Haskell :D

Not proving, conjecturing. It's not proven until this day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis

This is a misunderstanding of the Turing machine model. The Turing machine is not designed to be a realistically implementable physical machine, and indeed there are no details in Turing's paper on how such a physical machine could be achieved.

Instead, the Turing machine model is designed to be a mechanistic model of what a mathematician does (in rote day-to-day tasks at least). The tape is a representation of the notebook where the mathematician writes down notes. The read head is a representation of the mathematician reading from the notebook.

It's fascinating to read the paper because of this, since it spends quite a few paragraphs showing that this simplification doesn't lose anything of the mathematician's work. It spends some time noting that even though paper is two-dimensional, it can be losslessly compressed on unidimensional tape. It spends time noting that writing/reading one symbol at a time is a good enough approximation for human writing/reading. It spends time noting that the next step doesn't need to depend on more than the current symbol + internal state, as human attention is also focused on a limited number of symbols.

This is actually why Turing's paper is so convincing on the argument of universal computation - not because the machine is realizable, but because it's hard to invent anything that a mathematician does while calculating that is not captured by the Turing machine model.

I very much recommend reading the first part of the paper [0] to see this argument (the second part, where it is proven that this abstract machine can in fact compute all known numbers, is more technical and flew over my own head).

[0] PDF https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf

That's really important in an industry saturated with hype, elitism and general nonsense. Anything I can do in Rust, you can do in Assembly, so I've got some explaining to do (I can probably succeed in this example, others maybe not).

If Turing actually failed to deliver the goods on "completeness", I'd really like to resolve that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Historical_...

Among so much that’s just plain wrong, I really dislike the insidious idea that Turing’s horrible punishment at the hands of the state was wrong because he was a unique genius and war hero. No, it was wrong because he was a human being and being gay should not be a crime!

That line of thought makes it harder to argue that no, Turing may have been a genius but wasn’t unique, he was just a significant player in a rich field. That doesn’t make him any less interesting.

Of what I know, this might be, because he worked for the Nazis and his prototypes were mostly destroyed in the war and somewhat forgotten and seemed to have not been influential to the general branch of computing.

“While Zuse never became a member of the Nazi Party, he is not known to have expressed any doubts or qualms about working for the Nazi war effort.”

It reminds me of voting systems, but maybe that’s just because of the election yesterday. If you want to give singular nontransferrable credit, the things you say are important because giving someone credit takes it away from someone else. Division and fighting become the right answers. But if you spread the credit around, saying Leibniz and Newton both get calculus credit (and probably not just those two!), then discussions of which one should get the title of The One And Only Calculus Hero just seems absurd.

> The computable countability of the partial maps from N to N.

Can anybody give an example?

does this have any to do with rationals? or is it more related to limits and calculus?

"There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.

I guess whoever wrote that line didn't even get the irony.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/11/12/deus-ex-2

It’s pretty easy to understand from an average programmer’s perspective

I found the proofs at the end are a bit hard to follow but it’s not really critical to understand them if you just want to know what a Turing Machine is and the history/context behind it

I thought it was really interesting how Turing defines what are essentially “macros” for the machine

For example copy or erase

The contributions of people like Turing and Einstein were as important as they are claimed to be, they are not oversold.

On the other hand, I am also very annoyed that the majority of people have some idea about the importance of Turing or Einstein, but they are completely unaware that there were many other contemporaneous scientists whose contributions were equally important and neither Turing nor Einstein nor any of their many peers could have created their own original work without using the work of the others.

These myths about the singular geniuses are reflected in the stupid laws about the so-called "intellectual property".

There exists no new "intellectual property" that does not incorporate 99% of old "intellectual property", but this is not handled correctly in patent claims or in fair use conditions.

If the current laws about patents and copyrights would have been applied during the initial evolution of the electronics and computer industries, they would have never progressed to the level of today.

You’re overselling him right there. That wasn’t his feat, he was just on the team (and after Enigma had been initially broken).

If you want to group to math, you're going to have to compete with the likes of Euclid, Reiman, Bayes, Newton, Gauss, Cantor, Erdos, Fermat, Pascal, Leibniz, Bernoulli, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Fourier, Cauchy, Jacobi, Hamilton, Galois, Weierstrass, Cayley, Dedekind, Klein, Hilbert, Brouwer, Godel...

It's like calling astronomy "telescopy", to paraphrase Dijkstra.

That being said, I view Gödel's addition to be so mind-blowing that I can't help but privately think of him as the founder.

Turing I think resonates as a computer scientist more than a mathematician for the same reason that Ada Lovelace does: both of them shared, and made explicit in how they approached problems, the insight of the generalizability of computability beyond mathematics. Where Babbage saw a calculating machine spitting out numerical tables, Lovelace saw music and pictures. And not in the implicit reductive way most mathematicians assume that anything important can be modeled as mathematics: because if it can’t be modeled mathematically, it can’t be important. Turing and Lovelace both seemed to get that this is a mathematics that can act on anything, and that that’s what makes the mathematics interesting.

The extension beyond ‘and this lets you derive any provable true statement within a formal system in finite time’ to ‘and this lets you carry out any deterministic transformation on an arbitrary piece of text’ to something like ‘if machine translation is possible this machine can do it’ or ‘a sufficiently sophisticated machine like this could hold a convincingly human conversation’ is a through-line you can only make with Turing’s insights, not just Church or Gödel’s.

And sure, you need Shannon to give you a framework for information representation that extends it to any form of data and dozens of other contributions of course, and without the mathematical foundations of Church and Gödel et al there’s no foundation to build it on at all. But Turing’s bridge out of the mathematical philosophy world into the realm of stuff engineers like Zuse were building seems like as good a moment as any to draw a line and say ‘this is computer science’.

There is now a memorial at Bletchley Park to the Polish mathematicians who worked on Enigma.

So Enigma was genuinely re-broken, a few times, at Bletchley Park, indeed by an all-British team, but yes, easy to forget the little people who did all the initial work.