[HN Gopher] Turing Oversold?
___________________________________________________________________
Turing Oversold?
Author : anielsen
Score : 333 points
Date : 2021-09-14 10:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (people.idsia.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (people.idsia.ch)
| pantulis wrote:
| There are a lot of true facts thrown in the article, but it does
| not explore the reason _why_ this is.
|
| I feel the era of great thinkers who single handledly performed
| disruptive breakthroughs in their field, the Galileos and
| Newtons, was over with the Einstein-era (and even Einstein also
| stood in the shoulders of giants).
|
| No one works in isolation any more, and that is not a bad thing.
| You can subject any relevant figure to a similar analysis and
| come with the same results, it's absurd to try and come up with
| someone with such an overwhelming figure like Albert Einstein
| these days.
|
| But if you need to choose a Founding Father of Computing Science
| for the general public, I'd say Alan Turing is the best
| candidate. Scholars will give due credit to Church, Zuse, von
| Neumann and all the others.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Nobody exists in a vacuum, but I think Kuhn was right:
| scientific progress is made up of long periods of incremental
| work split between short bursts of paradigm shifts. Those
| shifts are more likely to rest on a few very influential people
| who take the current state and look at it in a considerably
| different way. We haven't had that in physics in quite a long
| time and might not again.
| OskarS wrote:
| > But if you need to choose a Founding Father of Computing
| Science for the general public, I'd say Alan Turing is the best
| candidate. Scholars will give due credit to Church, Zuse, von
| Neumann and all the others.
|
| I agree with this. It's certainly the case that I wish more
| people knew of Alonso Church and Kurt Godel, 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 Godel: 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.
| legostormtroopr wrote:
| > The fact that he was shamed into suicide is just all the
| more reason to celebrate him now.
|
| Please don't diminish his legacy by repeating this lie.
| Turings suicide is contentious and circumstantial at best.
| His documented behaviour had none of the very common signs of
| suicide - there was no note, he had plans for later in the
| week, and none of his close friends noted any change in
| behaviour.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Suicide or not, his treatment by society was equally
| heinous and repulsive. Even he had lived a complete and
| happy life, his story would have been a bright example of
| the terror and evil of homophobia.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Very much agreed about thinking deeply and having earned the
| title!
|
| He applied computational thinking all over the place, showing
| great foresight in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern
| kreetx wrote:
| This is just a theory, but I think this (assigning some major
| leap of science to few specific persons) is how society
| remembers things. I.e it is difficult, or even impossible, to
| go into the intricate histories of how things actually
| developed in middle or high school (and perhaps even in
| college), thus the people teaching us simplify it to make it
| easier to study and remember.
|
| 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.
| netcan wrote:
| A typical medieval depiction of a great siege might be one
| king and two or three famous knights with a ladder assaulting
| a 5 foot castle manned by another king and a knight.
| Distilling stories to a handful of characters seems to make
| it easier for us to digest. I suppose it's easier for us to
| imagine ourselves as one of these people.
| chubot wrote:
| Tangential, but one thing I learned from dense computer history
| book _The Dream Machine_ is that the term "von Neumann
| architecture" is improperly assigning credit:
|
| 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.
| pvg wrote:
| _even Einstein also stood in the shoulders of giants_
|
| 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...
| OrderlyTiamat wrote:
| I've heard this quote explained as an insult directed to one
| of Newtons enemies (either Leibiz or Hooke), referencing
| their short height. I'm not convinced it's true, but it is an
| amusing possibility.
| elzbardico wrote:
| The problem is that the general public thinks the CS ==
| Computers.
|
| 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.
| erhk wrote:
| Disruption is a canary word to me now.
| hoseja wrote:
| Because those others mostly aren't anglos helping the war
| effort.
| donkeybeer wrote:
| Everything builds on past work. Educated people, at least in
| europe, were quite well connected and aware of each others
| works in those times too.
| yann2 wrote:
| No one worked in isolation in the past either.
|
| 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.
| cxr wrote:
| "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and
| convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty
| that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton
| fields and sweatshops."
|
| <https://graph.global/?id=2851>
| mushishi wrote:
| Yup, the influences on e.g. Newton happening to delve into
| reading up on Archimedes, Descartes, Fermat, and then
| synthesizing their inventions in his mind with lot of time on
| his hand, or for that matter Leibniz getting math tutoring
| from Christiaan Huygens seem to be crucial in relation to the
| invention of fluxions/infinitesimals. (Approximately from
| memory of reading Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz).
|
| Doesn't diminish their achievement in my mind.
| vmilner wrote:
| Having lived both 10kms north and 10kms south of Newton's
| birthplace (in more flat Lincolnshire farmland) I'm not sure
| he's the best example for that argument!
| denton-scratch wrote:
| The idea that history is wrong to focus on "chaps" derives
| from marxism; and Fergusson is very much anti-marxist. The
| marxian view would be that historical change is the result of
| economic forces; that if (e.g.) Turing hadn't done it someone
| else would have, because economics was driving history in
| that direction.
|
| I'm sympathetic to the marxian view of Great Men; I think
| it's no coincidence that the related work of Godel and Turing
| was published within a couple of decades of one-another, or
| that the ideas of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo emerged
| around the same time as one-another.
|
| I'm certainly impressed by the greatness of Great Men; but
| I'm hard-pressed to find one whose discoveries were so
| remarkable, _in the context of their times_ , that noone else
| could have been expected to make similar discoveries around
| the same time.
| cxr wrote:
| Alternative angle: among their insights and discoveries,
| the successes will be shaped by survivorship bias. When
| deciding what part of one's work to focus on, a person will
| pursue the things that are close enough to other
| contemporary work at the time, because it provides a short
| path to buy-in.
| heurisko wrote:
| I watched the "Imitation Game" and read the biography of Turing
| by Andrew Hodges.
|
| What I found fascinating about the biography was recognising what
| Turing was describing in theoretical terms, as actual hardware
| and software concepts today. I know some parts are somewhat
| obvious, but it was still nice to trace the concepts back to
| excerpts from his work.
|
| The Imitation Game is a nice fiction, but doesn't portray Turing
| as having very much agency, in comparison to the real Turing. I
| think the fictional and real-life characters were completely
| different.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| The Imitation Game is awful and should never be screened.
| mlajtos wrote:
| It is a good _movie_. It introduced Turing to the masses in a
| compassionate way. Also it showed normal people that
| cryptography, despite being rather boring and mathy, is
| extremely important in everyday life.
|
| I also enjoyed Breaking the Code -
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115749/
| arethuza wrote:
| I would agree that is an enjoyable movie but also terrible
| history - but then most movies that deal with historical
| events are wildly inaccurate - usually for fairly
| understandable reasons.
|
| I was lucky enough to see the stage version of _Breaking
| the Code_ - Derek Jacobi was outstanding:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyDe8IWAxaY&t=168s
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mhh__ wrote:
| Relative to the 0 times I have ever heard his name mentioned vs.
| the countless times I have read about him on manic midnight
| wikipedia binges, I think Zuse seems very unsung.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Agreed. Zuse did a lot of cool stuff.
| amacbride wrote:
| Not completely surprising (from Wikipedia):
|
| "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."
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "I think Zuse seems very unsung"
|
| 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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Von Braun also worked for the Nazis.
|
| Interesting to speculate what would have happened if Zuse had
| been paper-clipped to the US and given a huge budget.
| schlupa wrote:
| One funny anecdote about Zuse during the war was that he
| managed to save his Z4 because it was named as V4 in the
| paperwork. The wehrmacht officers thought it was one of
| these retaliation weapon V1, V2, V3 so V4 was very
| important and got high priority to be hidden away
| somewhere.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Oh sure. I know _why_ , but I find computer engineering a bit
| more interesting than theory so I'd rather read about him
| than quite a few others.
| adrian_b wrote:
| There is an indirect influence of Zuse in the daily life of
| most programmers.
|
| The "for" keyword used in the "for" loops comes from Algol
| 60, which inherited it from its predecessor from 1958, IAL.
|
| The "for" loops were introduced in IAL by Heinz Rutishauser,
| who had used "fuer" loops (i.e. "for" in German) for the
| first time in 1951, when he had published a paper describing
| a computer programming language, 3 years before Fortran
| introduced the "do" loops in 1954.
|
| In the Rutishauser paper from 1951, he quotes Zuse with his
| paper about a programming language (published in 1948) as the
| inspiration for his own improved programming language, which
| included the "for" loops.
| jmull wrote:
| Well, this article certainly shoots itself right in the foot.
|
| If the problem is that some important early contributions to CS
| are being overlooked, the solution is to promote those
| contributions.
|
| By framing this as Turing vs. others, the focus is squarely on
| Turning and his contributions. It puts itself in the position of
| having to beat down and minimize Turing's contributions before
| raising up other contributions. Pretty much setting itself up to
| fail to convince very many.
|
| Instead, e.g., present the narrative of those early
| contributions, showing how they provided the foundation Turing
| worked from.
|
| (edit: I should add: I understand perfectly that the point of
| this article probably isn't to actually convince anyone of
| anything, but is just a hot take meant to get people worked up
| for the page views. So mission accomplished, from that
| perspective, I guess.)
| bobthechef wrote:
| I wonder how much of this is due to anglocentrism. Wouldn't be
| the first time.
| blazespin wrote:
| The article is an immature and childish distraction from a
| potentially interesting discussion (where do good ideas come
| from).
|
| There is no such thing as _The_ father of anything. That 's just
| one of the many incarnations of the insipid fantasy society has
| that "Daddy" will solve all your problems.
|
| Turing is absolutely _a_ father of computer science, and his
| contributions are interesting.
|
| This can be said for any scientist, historically speaking. Even
| Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants.
|
| Giving this article oxygen is a colossal waste of time. Just
| because someone somewhere said some stupid thing isn't a reason
| to write a 10,000 word essay on it with endless citations.
|
| Kinda like what we are doing now..
| NtochkaNzvanova wrote:
| Of course Turing didn't invent computer science. Everyone knows
| that Jurgen Schmidhuber invented computer science.
| liorben-david wrote:
| Name me a single mathematician - or honestly a single scientist
| or thinker ever that didn't stand on the shuolders of giant
| OhNoMyqueen wrote:
| He's not oversold. His major feat (breaking enigma using a
| computer) is miscategorized into Computer Science, where it
| should be classified into Computer Engineering and Software
| Engineering, alongside other stars like Charles Babbage and Ada
| Lovelace. His second major feat (the Turing Machine model) is one
| stone among the many foundational stones of Computer Science.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| _He 's not oversold. His major feat (breaking enigma using a
| computer)_
|
| You're overselling him right there. That wasn't _his_ feat, he
| was just on the team (and after Enigma had been initially
| broken).
| adrian_b wrote:
| Yes, "X oversold" is a poor choice of words for cases like
| Turing or Einstein.
|
| 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.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| This article gives far too little credit to John von Neumann (not
| to mention Turing).
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "especially in the Anglosphere".
|
| Just like the Wright brothers. And on and on and on. It pays off
| if you control culture.
| ocschwar wrote:
| No.
|
| What Turing did in 1937 might not have been an advance over what
| Godel and Church did. But if you want to make the case for
| building a general purpose computer out of mechanical relays or
| vacuum tubes in 1946, you need a semantic advance. Turing
| machines did that.
|
| Nobody would read Godel and say "let's build ENIAC." Tommy
| Flowers did read Turing and say that. THAT is the difference.
|
| It's like Einstein versus Lorenz. Same mathematics.Different
| semantic interpretation.
| pyentropy wrote:
| The average person has no clue what theoretical computer science
| is.
|
| But science fields do need marketing. All children have heroes
| they look up to. Putting focus on Turing's achievements is merely
| creating a pop star figure in the mainstream, which I think is a
| good thing: a smart dude works on a problem that saves World War
| 2 and now powers your phone and your TikTok app. Once you are
| actually interested in the field you can work out the nuances and
| the falsehoods in that claim.
|
| Evaluating earlier work in some field throughout history always
| leads to a complex graph of achievements, but you cannot put that
| graph in the name of an annual prize. Do we change "Turing Award"
| to "Frege-Cantor-Godel-Church-Turing"?
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| >All children have heroes they look up to.
|
| 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.
| Banana699 wrote:
| >a smart dude works on a problem that saves World War 2 and now
| powers your phone and your TikTok app.
|
| 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.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| >a smart dude works on a problem that saves World War 2 and
| now powers your phone and your TikTok app.
|
| So much for the Polish Cipher Bureau. Not so many tragic hero
| opportunities there.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Oversensitive and hyper-reactive?
|
| Jailing or sterilizing gay people for having sex is evil. End
| of story. It has only been 20 years since this was the law in
| some US states. I see no reason why vigorous rejection of
| this sort of policy as monstrous can possibly be seen as
| "oversensitive and hyper-reactive".
| Banana699 wrote:
| You missed the entire point.
|
| The point isn't that this oversensitivity is misplaced, the
| point is that it's moral outrage porn that the tellers of
| the story use in a smart way to get a reaction from you.
|
| This isn't necessarily a bad thing if it's just one or two
| story among others, after all the purpose of art is to get
| strong reactions out of its audience. But when every such
| story has to lean hard into the moral aspect to the
| exclusion of all else it becomes a trite children story
| told for nothing else but feel-good points.
|
| Consider the amount of articles on trump during his
| presidency. How much of it was high-quality investigative
| journalism telling you things you don't know, and how much
| was "Trump tweeted something shockingly stupid, here are a
| list of experts you don't need telling you this is
| shockingly stupid, this means End Of Democracy (EOD)" ? The
| latter articles are technically true, but it's trite and
| accomplishes nothing but pulling on your memetic levers to
| get you to like/share/feel-bad|good-all-day.
| ur-whale wrote:
| Jurgen Schmidhuber forging on in his never-ending quest to slay
| historical misattributions and generally right all wrongs.
|
| We can count ourselves lucky this time: at least, the topic isn't
| himself.
|
| On a positive note, he can't be accused of being inconsistent.
| Animats wrote:
| This has changed over time. In early computing, the people
| mentioned were Eckert and Mauchley, who designed the ENIAC, and
| von Neumann, who figured out how a practical CPU should be
| organized. Also Shannon, who figured out that relays basically
| did Boolean algebra and could be analyzed formally.
|
| Bletchley Park work was still classified in those days, so not
| much was known about that. Much to the annoyance of Tony Flowers,
| who built the Colossus code-breaking machine but couldn't mention
| it in post-war job-hunting. (Incidentally, Colossus was not a
| general-purpose computer. It was a key-tester, like a Bitcoin
| miner ASIC.)
|
| As I've pointed out before, the big problem was memory. IBM had
| electronic addition and multiplication, with tubes, in test
| before WWII. But the memory situation was really bad. Two tubes
| per bit. Or electromagnetic relays. Or electromechanical counter
| wheels, IBM's mainstay in the tabulator era. To store N bits, you
| had to build at least N somethings. Babbage's Analytical Engine
| called for a memory of a ring of rows of counter wheels, a
| mechanism the size of a locomotive. Access time would have been
| seconds.
|
| Much of early computing was about kludges to get some kind of
| memory. The "Manchester Baby" had a CRT-based memory, the
| Williams tube. That was the first computer to actually run a
| program stored in memory. Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and
| Geoff Tootill, 1948.
|
| After that, everybody got in on the act. Mercury tanks and long
| metal rods were built. Really slow, and the whole memory has to
| go past for each read, so twice the memory means twice the access
| time. Then there were magnetic drum machines. Magnetic tape.
| Finally, magnetic cores. At last, random access, but a million
| dollars a megabyte as late as 1970. Memory was a choice between
| really expensive and really slow well into the 1980s.
|
| Turing was involved with one of the early machines, Pilot
| ACE/ACE. But he quit before it was finished.
| netcan wrote:
| Just the references here are probably an amazing resource for
| early computer science, and I'm not going to argue against such a
| force.
|
| Seems to be a lot of uneasiness, of late, about the way credit is
| allocated in science. IMO, it's mistaken to point this at the
| top: nobel laureates, heroic icons like Einstein or Turing. These
| figures are _supposed_ to be idolized and idealized. Yes, this is
| "untrue," technically. But, it serves many purposes. A nobel
| prize win elevates _science_ by singling out scientists for hero
| status. Achilles elevated Greece by giving Greeks something to
| collectively aspire to or adulate.
|
| 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!
|
| Where poor credit allocation matters isn't historical hero
| narratives, it's at the working scientist level. The grants &
| positions level. Here, it's important to be accurate, fair, etc.
| Being inaccurate, unfair or corrupt at this level creates actual
| deficits.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Seems to be a lot of uneasiness, of late, about the way
| credit is allocated in science._ "
|
| 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.
| paganel wrote:
| Not scientists but some of the best writers of the 20th century
| never got a Nobel, I'm thinking especially about Proust and
| Kafka (and I would say Celine was more worthy of the Nobel than
| Camus and especially Sartre), I'm sure the same thing happens
| in science in regards to this Swedish prize.
| netcan wrote:
| True, but writing has many forms of hero culture. Tolkien
| doesn't need a nobel, neither does Kafka. They became heroes
| regardless.
| simorley wrote:
| > Seems to be a lot of uneasiness, of late, about the way
| credit is allocated in science.
|
| 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.
| breuleux wrote:
| Why do we need idols, though?
|
| 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.
| reedf1 wrote:
| Idolatry seems like an emergent property of human collective
| consciousness. You can try to ignore it (it's been tried),
| downplay it (also been tried), and ban it (and again).
| netcan wrote:
| >>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.
|
| The point isn't to prove that they're special. The point is
| that something special happened and these people are
| designated symbols for that... and they're kind of selected
| for being good at this. We're not doing this for them,
| they're dead. The celebrity of Einstein is a deification of
| his relativity theories. We need idols for our symbolic
| world, to work without them in the real one.
| breuleux wrote:
| But what purpose do these idols or symbols serve, exactly?
| I'm speaking as someone who doesn't care who came up with
| relativity and doesn't care whether there is a founding
| person of computer science or not let alone who that would
| be, and would like to know what others see. Is it an
| inspiration thing? A motivation thing?
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Not necessarily a motivational thing, but events such as
| these become widespread and allows for easier
| dissemination of information.
|
| It's easy to see then that such events allow for the
| eventual "recruitment" of other scientists, and in
| showing society that "science is working" and "solves
| important problems".
|
| Both of which serve to enrich the scientific world with
| new researchers and funding to keep the engine running.
| bentonite wrote:
| I'd say its a bit of both inspiration and motivation.
| That said, I think the main motivators for these kinds of
| idols/heroes are to craft ethical or normative stories
| for how people should (or shouldn't) behave as well as to
| assist with teaching people theories and concepts.
|
| Learning about why correlation doesn't equal causation
| (and spurrious correlations) is more impactful if you
| also learn about Wakefield's sins at the same time. He's
| a villian.
|
| Archimedes and the bathtub is a great story - and I
| learned it in elementary school and still remember it and
| the lessons it teaches. We like to associate people with
| events and they help for learning and retaining
| information.
| slibhb wrote:
| > Why do we need idols, though?
|
| Because we're flesh and blood, i.e. utterly irrational.
|
| > 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?
|
| Yes, definitely, a huge amount of what motivates scientists
| is desire for fame, being considered a genius, Nobel prizes,
| scientific immortality, and so on. It is entirely unrealistic
| to imagine that we can stop being like this, it's almost a
| religious belief, akin to thinking that, one day, people can
| live without sin.
|
| > 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.
|
| This may be an accurate description of your personality, in
| which you're one in a million, or it may be that you're
| ignorant about the things that actually drive you. The vast
| majority of people are driven by some kind of desire for
| fame, recognition, status, upvotes, and so on.
|
| Suggesting that Turing and Einstein were not "exceptional
| geniuses" is bizarre. Even in proper context, they were
| exceptional geniuses, just among other, lesser-known,
| exceptional geniuses. If we take your view seriously, we
| remove all human agency and uniqueness, we remove the idea of
| an "achievement" and we can only give credit to luck, the
| historical process, and various contingent circumstances.
| Even if your view is accurate, people simply cannot live that
| way. Creating narratives is part of what makes us human and
| narratives need protagonists (idols, heroes, whatever).
| breuleux wrote:
| > This may be an accurate description of your personality,
| in which you're one in a million, or it may be that you're
| ignorant about the things that actually drive you. The vast
| majority of people are driven by some kind of desire for
| fame, recognition, status, upvotes, and so on.
|
| Or it might be that people who are driven by fame and
| recognition are more likely to become famous than those who
| aren't, which skews our idea of what motivates people.
| Given how emphatic society is about fame and money as
| markers of success, I feel people tend to be mistaken in
| the other direction: many people think they are, or should
| be driven by fame or money even when it simply contradicts
| their personality.
|
| Even if it was indeed the case that most people are
| motivated by fame, I think those who aren't are more like 1
| in 3 or 1 in 4 than 1 in a million. It might be 1 in a
| million in actually famous people, but not in the
| population at large.
|
| > Even in proper context, they were exceptional geniuses,
| just among other, lesser-known, exceptional geniuses.
|
| If I am correct that millions of people had the capability,
| that would place "exceptional genius" at 1 in 1000, or 1 in
| 10000. I think that's a reasonable ballpark.
|
| > If we take your view seriously, we remove all human
| agency and uniqueness, we remove the idea of an
| "achievement" and we can only give credit to luck, the
| historical process, and various contingent circumstances.
|
| Whether we acknowledge exceptional geniuses or not, it
| remains the case that 99.99% of people are not exceptional
| geniuses. Are you saying these people don't have agency, or
| that they aren't unique? I think we all have agency, we're
| all unique, and we all have achievements. Some achievements
| are more impactful than others, some achievements are more
| impressive than others, but these are not necessarily the
| same, and neither is necessarily remembered, because what
| matters most is not the person or the achievement, but how
| the story fits in the narrative. In any case, you don't
| need to care about that narrative to care about or
| acknowledge agency, uniqueness or achievement.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| An aspect of lionization is a wish and motivation to emulate
| and become heroic oneself...
|
| 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._
| simonh wrote:
| Right, we shouldn't underestimate the importance of narratives.
| We need narratives about the theoretical foundations of
| computer science, and Turing is the perfect figure to weave
| many of those narratives around. It's good for young people and
| the general public, and good for the field.
|
| 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.
| netcan wrote:
| Don't forget the tragic way society later betrayed him.
| roenxi wrote:
| We also shouldn't underestimate the importance of truth.
| Dealing with the world as-it-is has better results than
| interacting with a story we'd like to be true but isn't.
|
| People waste their lives in service of causes and ideas that
| just are not grounded in reality. Not just in the
| philosophical sense that we cannot know truth, but in the
| practical sense of "the outcome you want will not flow from
| the actions you are taking today". Narratives are inferior to
| truth when it comes to making decisions.
| simonh wrote:
| I'm not advocating telling lies. Sometimes we simplify, and
| doing so can be perfectly appropriate. Unfortunately that
| does open the stage for nitpicking and pedantry.
| nzmsv wrote:
| Disagree. A finely crafted but ultimately false story can
| be actively harmful. A young person may think that they
| are not of the same caliber as "the greats" and cannot
| make their mark on a field, which would discourage them
| from trying. All the while in reality "the greats" were
| never as great as the historians later depicted them.
| "Come on in, collaborate, and make a difference" would be
| a much more positive message and wouldn't be any harder
| to explain than what amounts to the creation of
| personality cults.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| This is where the humanities has the tech world beat.
| While we quibble over correct narratives and seek one
| option, the humanities has been completely soaked in the
| idea that there are nearly unlimited narratives that
| describe any given human endeavor and they weave together
| into a rich and ever-changing tapestry.
|
| This is why a historian can read, understand (both the
| pros and the cons), and respect books that represent an
| economic history, a social history, an information
| history, a microhistory, and even a great-man history of
| a given subject without trouble.
|
| More reason for engineers to take humanities courses!
| nzmsv wrote:
| So can I continue to prefer my narrative? It seems to
| gather some upvotes and some downvotes, so at least it is
| interesting and elicits a reaction :)
|
| Also, the more I learn about my heroes the more I realize
| that they never saw themselves as ubermensch. If
| anything, self doubt seems to be the common thread. I
| think this angle does not get enough attention.
|
| However, I agree with you on a broader point. This is
| just one perspective. Here is another one: Turing the
| historical figure is necessarily oversold because many
| more people than Turing the real person contributed to
| his aggrandizement. Like all cultural icons, Turing the
| idea outlived and outshined Turing the man.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > So can I continue to prefer my narrative? It seems to
| gather some upvotes and some downvotes, so at least it is
| interesting and elicits a reaction :)
|
| I think most of that reaction isn't coming from your
| narrative on history, it's from accusing other
| commenter's narratives of being _false_.
| simonh wrote:
| Nobody here is advocating telling false stories. Saying
| that Turing laid the foundations for computer science is
| not false. It's a perfectly valid opinion to hold. We
| might say it's a simplification, or even an exaggeration,
| arguably saying he's one of them might be better, but
| it's not a false statement.
| sandwall wrote:
| Story telling is how our society has transferred
| information since we started to communicate--
| understanding the map is not the territory, nor should it
| be. A beautiful narrative can convey important kernels
| more efficiently than endless minutiae-- Awareness of
| this is important and elaborations are helpful for those
| interested in the details.
|
| I'm reminded of, "The Glass Bead Game," which discusses
| an academic society that forgets the names of
| contributors since they're all just part of the flow of
| humanity
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Arguably our storytelling was an efficient hack in an age
| before writing. A story is a very high-overhead, low SNR
| way of communicating kernels of truth, but it's robust
| over time, so it allowed transfer and accumulation of
| knowledge across societies and generations.
|
| But then we've invented and perfected writing, developed
| symbolic languages and notations (e.g. math, musical),
| long-duration storage media for text, and eventually
| networked digital computers. In terms of communicating
| and preserving knowledge, stories are pretty much the
| _worst possible option you can choose_.
|
| We're comfortable with narratives because we didn't have
| anything else for hundreds of thousands of years. Stories
| are pretty much hardwired into our brains. But that
| doesn't make them the right choice, now that we've
| figured out much better alternatives.
|
| More than that, I'm personally suspicious of stories
| being used in communication. There's no good reason to
| use them, and there's plenty of bad ones - it so happens
| that what makes a good story robust over time is the same
| thing you need to manipulate people into believing lies
| and shut off critical thinking.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| The main benefit of stories is that they are easier for
| people to remember than dry details. In terms of
| communicating knowledge, they are the form that are most
| likely to stick with us as opposed to going in one ear
| and out the other. Especially when it comes to areas
| where someone doesn't have expertise. This is as you
| noted incredibly prone to manipulation, but it doesn't
| change that it you want a random person picked off the
| street to actually synthesize the knowledge you're trying
| to tell them, a story is by far the way most likely to
| work. And I'd say that's important, since knowledge
| written down somewhere that no one remembers or cares
| about does nothing to change the way people act.
|
| As far as preserving information goes, no argument there.
| Stories aren't a good way to preserve the truth of
| matters for future generations. To look and determine if
| the stories told have truth in them requires more
| detailed writing.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Stories place ideas into context, not only making them
| easier to remember (as mentioned by another comment) but
| also easier to understand. Analytic philosophers are used
| to dry, precise language, but even they often rely on
| scenarios and narratives -- this can help reveal what the
| reader thinks intuitively and bring that into sharper
| contrast. By remaining story-free you're giving pedagogy
| the short shrift.
|
| What has empirically brought more folks into careers in
| science, dry textbooks foisted by teachers or Star Trek?
| I'd argue Star Trek and science fiction more generally.
| You can chalk that up to human failings if you like, but
| inspiration is a need that can't be avoided if you wish
| to convince.
| Retric wrote:
| The issue with stories is they focus on unimportant bits
| often for propaganda reasons. Pick some arbitrary first
| and every country can find someone to play up as a home
| town hero. The US just happens to be rather quite around
| who "invented" electricity but longer lasting
| incandescent lightbulbs and kites in lightning storms
| that's the ticket. The British tend to streamline the
| Benchley park narrative by dropping the preceding polish
| contribution etc etc.
|
| In that context narratives end up glorifying endless
| minutiae.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Setting the record straight on this matter isn't
| nitpicking and pedantry, it's just giving credit where it
| is due. Since the intent of the "simplification" isn't to
| deceive, this shouldn't be a problem.
| wirthjason wrote:
| A fascinating book on Turing and Church is "The Annotated
| Turing". It's a walk through of Turings paper with analysis and
| commentary.
|
| It was written by Charles Petzold, who also wrote the immensity
| popular book "CODE".
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Turing-Through-Historic-Com...
| arduinomancer wrote:
| +1
|
| 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
| 0x456 wrote:
| There is also the related "Matthew effect"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect#Sociology_of_sc...
| kazinator wrote:
| I feel that this article wastes effort on attacking a bit of a
| strawman.
|
| In the fields of computing and mathematics, nobody (hopefully)
| believes bunk like that Turing started computer science or
| invented the first computer. My reactions to all that were,
| "what? who thinks that, and why don't they check the Wikipedia?"
|
| If such beliefs are circulating among laypeople, it is good to
| debunk them. But doing so in this article (especially while
| failing to acknowledge that they are strictly lay myths that no
| mathematician or computer scientist believes) detracts its main
| thesis, which is about the excessive attribution to particular
| individuals, while others are ignored/forgotten.
|
| Turing is not excessively attributed with anything in our field.
| He's frequently referenced, mainly because he articulated a
| concrete model of computation which can be simulated and using
| which proofs can be made about computability.
|
| I mean, academia doesn't habitually make up lies about who did
| what, especially if they are not coming from that person or
| persons. I.e. if you don't misrepresent your work yourself, the
| field is generally not going to step in and do that for you.
| Embellishing the exploits and contributions of some eminent
| persona may be what some careless journalists or bloggers
| sometimes do, but that's neither here nor there.
| yodelshady wrote:
| It's certainly true that Turing didn't invent computer science.
| As a point of order:
|
| > A popular British movie [The Imitation Game] even went so far
| as to say he invented the computer.
|
| The Imitation Game that was financed by a US production company,
| with an American screenwriter and Norwegian director? _That_
| British movie?
| ajkjk wrote:
| I feel like it's really weird to call what Godel was doing
| computer science.
| amelius wrote:
| I feel that computer science is really the wrong word.
|
| It's like calling astronomy "telescopy", to paraphrase
| Dijkstra.
| jessaustin wrote:
| "Computation" would have been a more felicitous term for the
| field, but that ship has probably sailed.
| stepbeek wrote:
| Encoding logical statement into numbers is foundational, but I
| do see your point. I don't know of any evidence that says that
| Godel was interested in automating computation through his
| encoding.
|
| That being said, I view Godel's addition to be so mind-blowing
| that I can't help but privately think of him as the founder.
| jameshart wrote:
| Right - in Godel's mind, he was trying to model how mathematics
| works - the same applies to the problem Hilbert and co were
| framing in the Entscheidungsproblem. They were wrestling with
| the foundational philosophy of how powerful mathematics could
| ever claim to be.
|
| 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 Godel'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 Godel 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'.
| progre wrote:
| I makes sense to me. The "computer science" to "practical
| computer work" relationship has about the same distance as
| fundamental physics has to industrial chemistry.
| ajkjk wrote:
| yeah, but what he was doing was much more in the realm of
| logic and set theory, which is to say mathematics, not
| concerned with anything to do with computation.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| All politicians and state officers should be required to pass the
| Turing test.
| Labo333 wrote:
| I'm not going to comment on the actual content that is mostly [1]
| scientifically correct, but Schmidhuber (the author) has a record
| of wanting to be the center of attention [2] (even though LeCun
| is not better on that matter). Also, a third of the sources are
| written by him...
|
| Just look at his previous blog post [3], in which he explains
| that the most cited neural networks all cite works by him. These
| papers cite dozens of papers, so a lot of other groups that are
| active in AI can claim the same thing...
|
| [1]: For example, Turing published an independent proof of the
| Entscheidungsproblem, in the [TUR] article, just a month after
| Church, that the article forgets to highlight.
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Schmidhuber#Views
|
| [3]: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/most-cited-neural-nets.html
| IshKebab wrote:
| > of wanting to be the center of attention
|
| 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.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| Surely the more noble cause for that would be giving more
| credit to others, rather than attempting to take away credit
| from a well known figure. This article is somewhat about the
| other important figures who's knowledge Turing's was built
| off, but its central point is that Turing gets too much
| credit.
|
| I understand why he'd care about that if he'd been uncredited
| and watched peers be overcredited, but I'd hardly call it a
| noble work, even if it is understandable.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| The article is full of credit given to a huge number of
| people.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| The article is called Turing oversold, and the article is
| all about who should be getting credit instead of Turing.
| This isn't "Hey, are you aware of all these people who
| helped develop computer science", its "Turing is
| overcredited, heres a list of other people to support my
| argument"
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> I'm not going to comment on the actual content that is
| mostly [1] scientifically correct, but Schmidhuber (the author)
| has a record of wanting to be the center of attention [2] (even
| though LeCun is not better on that matter).
|
| 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...
| albertzeyer wrote:
| He just wants to get the facts right, esp the correct
| attribution to the original scientific contributions (who did
| it first).
|
| 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.
| exporectomy wrote:
| He seems a bit self-contradictory saying both "value those who
| ensure that science is self-correcting." and "when it comes to
| credit assignment in science, the important question is: Who did
| it first?"
|
| Probably worth stepping back and asking why we have heroes in the
| first place. It obviously doesn't serve the hero himself because
| he's dead. It's for the benefit of other people. Perhaps if it
| seems unfair, people won't be so inspired by them, but that's
| more about perception and modern culture than reality.
|
| We already have a million and one scientists trying to be the
| first to discover a novel phenomenon but in a useless and non-
| self-correcting way and not even bothering to follow up on their
| own "discovery", perhaps hoping someone else will do the hard
| work while they enjoy the credit of being first. I'd also say
| that perhaps it doesn't count if you do it first but your results
| remain hidden and unused. I'll bet some native African discovered
| Angel Falls before Angel did, but that knowledge didn't get out
| to the wider world so what was the point of it?
| okl wrote:
| Related books with more depth by Edgar Daylight:
|
| - Turing Tales: https://dijkstrascry.com/turingtales
|
| - The Dawn of Software Engineering: https://dijkstrascry.com/dawn
| bee_rider wrote:
| I guess to some extent I can understand some defensiveness of
| Leibniz, given that he probably deserves a ton of the credit we
| normally give Newton (and there was actually some bad blood
| between the two).
|
| But Godel is incredibly famous, isn't he? I don't see why there's
| a need to give him more credit.
|
| Also it is weird that this article doesn't have a couple
| paragraphs on Von Neumann, he's underappreciated and also very
| cool.
| tegeek wrote:
| If you take away all the media hype around Alan Turning and just
| see his contributions, he will still stand out.
|
| On Computable Numbers [1] is perhaps one of the top 3 papers in
| the history of Mathematics. One of the most remarkable thing
| about Turning Machine is its simplicity.
|
| Then again, in 1950, Can Machine Think[2] is perhaps the top 3
| papers in the history of Philosophy. And then again, one of the
| most remarkable thing about Turing Test and the Imitation Game is
| its simplicity.
|
| The impact of these two papers in the academia, industry and in
| our lives is huge.
|
| Alan Turning is easily one of the top 3 Mathematicians and
| Philosophers of all time.
|
| [1]. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf
|
| [2]. https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238
| wheaties wrote:
| Mathematicians? No. Computer Science? Yes.
|
| 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...
| bjornsing wrote:
| Having an educational background in physics I find the Turing
| Machine a much more intuitive model of computation than say
| lambda calculus. To me this is Turing's main contribution:
| linking the abstract world of computation to the physical world,
| and proving that a very simple physical machine can perform any
| computation (Turing completeness). That's no small contribution.
| lou1306 wrote:
| This dualism in CS still carries on to this day. Essentially,
| the lambda calculus is the forefather of the functional
| approach to computation, while the Turing machine epitomizes
| the imperative paradigm.
| kerblang wrote:
| So okay yeah it's Turing Completeness that matters the most to
| me as computer science, on a purely pragmatic basis: When
| people are pitching the latest whiz-bang doodad, the answer is
| always, "This isn't doing anything we couldn't already do, so
| how does it make things easier and do it efficiently enough for
| our purposes?" That's the proper question when it comes to
| monads, coroutines, actors, non-blocking blah blah, etc. etc.
|
| 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.
| skissane wrote:
| > I find the Turing Machine a much more intuitive model of
| computation than say lambda calculus
|
| I think register machines are more intuitive than Turing
| machines - they are much closer to how real world computers
| work.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| But that's the opposite direction from Turing's intention.
| The point of the Turing machine model is for the machine to
| be both mechanically plausible (no magic required) but also
| equivalent to what a human does when performing computation.
|
| The Turing machine model is a mechanically plausible
| abstraction of a human performing a computation by following
| some steps in their mind and with a notebook. The tape stands
| in for the notebook. The read head stands in for the human's
| eyes. The write head stands in for their pencil hand. The
| internal state of the machine stands in for their mental
| state. At every step, you either read a symbol from the
| notebook tape and change your mental state in relation to
| this symbol, or write a symbol based on the current mental
| state. The procedure itself can be written on the tape, and
| you can occasionally refer back to it.
|
| The original paper spends a good few pages working out this
| metaphor and showing that the machine model perfectly
| abstracts the mathematician's work of computation.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| In the days where you can buy a ram chip, a register machine
| is a really easy abstraction.
|
| If you're trying to imagine something you can mechanically
| assemble out of discrete compoonents, it's not so great. You
| need an unlimited number of components hooked up in
| complicated ways.
|
| A turing machine is a fixed-size and relatively simple box,
| plus a long tape that feeds through.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Yes, on the abstract computation side of the link register
| machines are much more intuitive.
|
| But on the physical side of the link they are much less
| intuitive IMHO: it's much less clear that "this is just a
| machine that I could build in my garage".
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The Turing machine is definitely not some machine that you
| could build in your garage. None of the mechanisms are
| specified or even specifiable. The important part, to
| Turing ateast, is that it perfectly matches what a human
| does while computing a number, and that there are no
| magical steps like 'thinking'. Read symbol, change internal
| state, write other symbol down, rinse and repeat.
|
| All of the details of how a symbol is read, recognized, how
| it alters the internal state, how the next symbol is
| chosen, or even how many symbols you actually need are not
| mentioned and even considered irrelevant. Turing wasn't
| building one of these, he was proving that this model
| captures all known computation, and that even so it is
| undecidable whether this machine would ever stop for any
| arbitrary computation.
| bjornsing wrote:
| No "the Turing Machine" isn't a machine you can build in
| your garage. It's an abstraction.
|
| But any individual Turing machine is. Building a simple
| one is not very hard, and you can imagine supplying it
| with more and more tape as it needs it.
|
| It's thus the only model of computation that I can fully
| imagine "working". And that to me is the beauty of
| Turing's contribution.
| skissane wrote:
| The "physical side" was probably more important when Turing
| first came up with the idea, and people struggled to
| conceive of computers because none had yet been built.
| Nowadays it is arguably less necessary because they are an
| essential part of everyday life, and most people learn some
| programming before learning theoretical computer science.
| anta40 wrote:
| Back to undergraduate days > a decade ago, I think I learnt
| both lambda calculus and Turing machine at the same class:
| Formal Language and Automata Theory.
|
| 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
| nightcracker wrote:
| > and proving that a very simple physical machine can perform
| any computation (Turing completeness)
|
| Not proving, conjecturing. It's not proven until this day:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis
| skissane wrote:
| It can never be "proven" because the notion of "any
| computation" being referred to is informal.
|
| Also, it can't perform _any_ computation, if we say
| hypercomputation is a form of computation. Hypercomputation
| is (as far as we know) physically impossible, but so strictly
| speaking are Turing machines - a true Turing machine has
| unlimited storage, and an unlimited amount of time in which
| to complete its computations - any Turing machine you could
| physically construct would only be a finite approximation of
| a real one.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Ah, ok, I should have said "any computation that can be
| performed by any Turing Machine".
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > and proving that a very simple physical machine can perform
| any computation (Turing completeness)
|
| 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
| codeflo wrote:
| I'm with you, I also found Turing's argument that his machine
| model captures _all_ of computation very convincing and
| pointed that out in another thread.
|
| However, for this argument to work, we need to accept both
| that all computation is captured by Turing machines, and also
| that what Turing machines do is in fact computable. In
| essence, Turing machine <=> realizable machine. Maybe some
| people are more impressed by one, others more by the other
| direction of that double implication.
| bobthechef wrote:
| > the Turing machine model is designed to be a mechanistic
| model of what a mathematician does (in rote day-to-day tasks
| at least)
|
| Or more accurately, what _human computers_ did in those days
| (i.e. the rooms full of people algorithmically working out
| numerical calculations for e.g. physicists or whatever
| without understanding what they were doing beyond the
| mechanical steps they were taking). In other words a
| formalization of so-called effective methods.
| bjornsing wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I've read the paper. I think we just take different things
| from it, possibly because you have a background in
| mathematics?
|
| To me, the main takeaway (if I imagine reading it in 1936) is
| that a universal Turing machine is not all that complicated,
| and arouses the "I could build this thing"-intuition.
|
| That of course doesn't mean that Turing intended it to be
| realizable, that's not my point. But he appeals to an
| engineer's intuition. It's that intuitive link that's
| valuable and unique IMHO.
|
| BTW, I think your takeaway is probably clearer in Godel's
| work.
| eynsham wrote:
| The Turing machine has a tape of unbounded size so can't be
| built simpliciter.
|
| Moreover although it turns out that that model of
| computation is very robust and sufficient for all purposes
| in physics (unless black holes or something allow
| hypercomputation) Turing does not really definitively show
| that and in a way that can't be definitively shown. All we
| have is a lack of counterexamples (admittedly a very
| convincing one.)
|
| I don't see why this intuition is that helpful generally
| either; Turing machines don't really help at an
| implementation level with modern engineering problems as
| far as I can tell. Most of the time you know that what you
| want to do is possible in finite time &c.--presumably the
| difficulty is doing what you want to do, and going via the
| Turing formalism would be a bit odd.
| bjornsing wrote:
| > The Turing machine has a tape of unbounded size so
| can't be built simpliciter.
|
| On the contrary, I think this is one of the advantages of
| Turing's model: I can imagine standing there in my garage
| looking on as my universal Turing machine is running low
| on tape on the left side, and then simply attaching a new
| roll of fresh empty tape at the end, holding it as it is
| fed into the machine. :)
|
| It's simply the least leaky abstraction of computation.
| codeflo wrote:
| Exactly this. Unbounded doesn't mean infinite, and people
| are sometimes confused by the distinction.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| Including me. What is the difference?
| hansvm wrote:
| The usual difference is just predicate ordering -- (1)
| for every program there exists a tape big enough vs (2)
| there exists a tape big enough for every program. In the
| first case, each individual (valid) program can get by
| with a tape of _some_ fixed length, but there's no bound
| on how big that requisite length might be. In the second
| case, since the tape requirements can be arbitrarily high
| you would need a legitimately infinite tape to service
| all possible programs.
|
| IMO the given example muddies the waters a bit by
| conflating the conceptual tape a given machine is running
| on (which might be infinite for non-halting programs)
| with the physical tape you've used so far (for which it
| suffices for such tape to be finite at any fixed moment
| in time, though the amount needed might grow unboundedly
| as time increases).
| codeflo wrote:
| Note that tape usage typically depends on the input, so I
| would distinguish programs and computations (program +
| input).
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| In a theoretical sense, an unbounded number is always
| finite.
|
| In a practical sense, turing machines don't voraciously
| consume tape. Adding extra feet of tape gives you an
| exponential increase in what you can compute. So if you
| set up a program to be reasonably judicious with its tape
| use, you can just say that if it reaches an end you pause
| it for a day, head to the shop, and buy another reel. Big
| computations take a lot of time anyway.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| Any given number is always bounded. I am not sure it
| makes sense to talk about an unbounded number
| [deleted]
| codeflo wrote:
| Some parts of mathematics deal with infinite sequences,
| that is, actually infinite lists of numbers. It's usually
| assumed, and important for analysis, that these numbers
| are considered to be "all there" right from the
| beginning. You can do operations like: Compute the limit.
| Add up all of its elements. Determine whether two
| sequences are identical for all entries after the
| trillionth.
|
| I think this is often part of the misunderstanding when
| you stumble into a post by someone who's confused about
| 0.999... = 1. People sometimes write things like:
| "0.999... only moves closer and closer to 1, it never
| reaches 1." I think that highlights a deeper point than
| people usually give these comments credit for. The thing
| is, 0.999... doesn't "move" anywhere, it's considered a
| completed object right from the beginning.
|
| Anyway, the point is that Turing machines are not like
| this at all. They only look at a fixed-size part of the
| tape during each step, from this follows that they have
| only used a finite amount of tape at each point of their
| execution.
|
| So for any given (halting) computation, you don't
| actually need an infinite tape, you just need "enough",
| without changing the result. This is important because it
| makes Turing machines a model for practical computers.
| For example, the device you're reading this on has
| gigabytes of tape, and that's big enough for many, many,
| many kinds of computation.
| titzer wrote:
| FTA:
|
| > They did not exploit this--Turing used his (quite inefficient)
| model only to rephrase the results of Godel and Church on the
| limits of computability.
|
| That's an infuriating sentence, as the author clearly has no clue
| how insanely inefficient Church numerals are. For those who don't
| know, Church numerals are literally a _unary_ encoding of
| integers as repeatedly applied functions.
|
| I read a lot of this article and at no point was I nodding along,
| but at this point I just had to pause and vent. This person has
| something _against_ Turing to the point that it 's just weird.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Nice to acknowledge the work of lesser known lights, but the
| article kind of reduces to another variation of, "your co-
| ordinates for belief and identity are arbitrary and unstable, the
| protagonists of the story you tell yourself are villains, it's
| probably because you are a shameful example of a person and
| should expect punishment, but you can redeem yourself by
| renouncing belief and aligning to the narrative of progress in
| the present."
|
| It passes the popular bar for new knowledge because it
| illustrates a conflict and resolves it, but it's in a cognitive
| style that seems to conflate debasing knowledge with discovering
| it. It is how people are educated these days, where it is
| sufficient to destabilize and neutralize target ideas instead of
| augmenting or improving them, so it's no surprise, but the
| article seemed like a good example to articulate what is
| irritating about this trend in educated thinking.
| jesuslop wrote:
| An _ad fontes_ breadcrumb elucidation I think that passes through
| Godel 1934, in SS9 "General recursive functions". "...this leads
| to the question what one would mean by 'every recursive
| function'. One _may attempt_ to define this notion as follows...
| ", and remites to footnote 34: "This was suggested by Herbrand in
| private cummunication". Finally the note points to the article
| post scriptum where Godel appraises (later) Turing work as
| settling what would become known Church's thesis, that Turing
| machines exhaust all 'mechanical procedures'. "In consequence of
| later advances, in particular of the fact that, due to A. M.
| Turing's work, a precise and unquestionably adequate definition
| of the general concept of formal system [by defining 'mechanical
| procedure'] can now be given..."
| rg111 wrote:
| Also see this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27536974
|
| It's almost like Schmidhuber hates Turing and wants the world to
| worship Godel.
|
| It's _personal_ for him.
|
| He also wrote a tweet and maybe another post where he ranked up
| all countries of Europe and says that Europeans collectively got
| the most medals in Olympics and hence they are superior.
|
| He suffers from this weird and serious case of European
| Supremacy.
|
| I know about his actual works (not what he claims to have done).
|
| And based on that I respect him.
|
| He also has got a cult of people following him and who will gang
| up on any dissenters, i.e. people not thinking of him as a
| walking god.
|
| Schmidhuber has actual contributions, I know.
|
| Now he moved to a country with extremely bad record of human
| rights, and has policies and implementation that put the Taliban
| to shame.
|
| Now he is promoting the institution left and right any
| opportunity he gets.
|
| He is very hard to take seriously.
| amw-zero wrote:
| This did not convince me that Turing's accomplishments are
| exaggerated. Anyone who knows computing history knows that there
| are many people involved. But Turing's contributions are not
| overstated, they are just accurate. That doesn't mean that he was
| the only computer scientist in the world.
| ogogmad wrote:
| I need to find a reference for this:
|
| Goedel apparently believed that it was impossible to explicitly
| enumerate all the partial computable functions over the integers,
| until Turing proved him wrong. He reasoned as follows:
|
| - You can't enumerate the total functions because Cantor's
| diagonal argument is constructive. Given a claimed enumeration of
| N^N, you can perform Cantor's diagonal construction to produce a
| computable element of N^N not in the enumeration. So N^N is
| computably uncountable.
|
| - Classical set theory says that a superset of an uncountable set
| is also uncountable.
|
| The problem is that while a superset of an uncountable set is
| uncountable, a superset of a _computably uncountable_ set may
| instead be computably countable. The partial functions over the
| integers show that this is indeed the case.
|
| Cantor's construction is blocked because a partial function can
| output a degenerate value called non-termination. A computable
| function must map the non-termination value to itself. Since it
| isn't mapped to something different, Cantor's construction can't
| produce something outside an enumeration.
| bsedlm wrote:
| > The problem is that while a superset of an uncountable set is
| uncountable, a superset of a computably uncountable set may
| instead be computably countable. The partial functions over the
| integers show that this is indeed the case.
|
| > 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?
| ogogmad wrote:
| > does this have any to do with rationals? or is it more
| related to limits and calculus?
|
| No.
|
| I'm going to use Haskell, which I'm going to assume you know.
| I'm using it because it seems closer to the math. The type
| for naturals is:
|
| data Nat = Zero | Succ Nat
|
| and then all Haskell functions of type `Nat -> Nat` represent
| partial functions. They're not total functions because they
| might enter an infinite loop for some inputs. You can clearly
| enumerate all Haskell functions which are syntactically
| correct and which have type Nat->Nat, so the partial
| functions of that type are computably enumerable.
|
| But consider the total functions of type Nat->Nat (i.e. those
| that never enter an infinite loop). Assume you can have a
| function `en :: Nat -> (Nat -> Nat)` which can output every
| total function of type Nat->Nat.
|
| Then the function `counterexample n = Succ (en n n)` is a
| function that cannot be outputted by `en`, and therefore `en`
| fails to enumerate all total functions.
|
| I've got other things to do, unfortunately, so I can't say
| more than this.
|
| [edit] Fixed the counterexample.
| codeflo wrote:
| I think the more widespread term for what you call "computably
| countable" is "computably enumerable", perhaps in part to make
| the distinction more clear. For example, the set of all natural
| numbers is (trivially) c.e., but has many non-c.e. subsets. But
| to understand this _is_ understanding the Entscheidungsproblem,
| so it shouldn 't be surprising that this was less clear before
| that was resolved.
| ogogmad wrote:
| Computably countable is also a correct term. In line with
| this approach to computability theory:
| http://math.andrej.com/asset/data/synthetic-slides.pdf
|
| It shows that the unsolvability of the halting problem
| follows from:
|
| - The computable uncountability of N^N, which can be proved
| using an identical argument to the one Cantor used to prove
| the set-theoretic uncountability of N^N.
|
| - The computable countability of the partial maps from N to
| N.
|
| If the halting problem were solvable, then the second bullet
| point would contradict the first. So it's essentially a weird
| twist on set theory that uses constructive logic.
| codeflo wrote:
| I don't doubt that the term is in use, and I understood
| what you meant. But it's not listed among seven (!)
| synonyms for computably enumerable on Wikipedia, and more
| the point, the slides you linked to also don't contain that
| term.
|
| However, that's not the point I wanted to make. I wouldn't
| like calling it computably countable even if everyone else
| did, simply because it gives the wrong intuition about
| subsets.
| ogogmad wrote:
| > the slides you linked to also don't contain that term
|
| The term "countable" is used in the slides, where it
| means computably enumerable. The adjective "computably"
| is used when there's a need to distinguish set-theoretic
| notions from similarly behaved computability-theoretic
| notions. Otherwise the meaning of the term "countable"
| can be context-dependent.
|
| > it gives the wrong intuition about subsets
|
| In constructive logic, a countable set can contain an
| uncountable subset. The misleading intuition (in the
| context of non-classical logics) is based on classical
| logic where countability is a statement about the size of
| a set. Whether you think constructive logic is a good way
| of explaining computability theory is another question,
| but it's certainly a viable way of doing it.
|
| It's like how the term "line" can mean something
| different in hyperbolic geometry from what it means in
| Euclidean geometry. You could argue that it might mislead
| people about the nature of parallel lines, but that's why
| hyperbolic geometry is not Euclidean geometry. Another
| example is using "multiplication" to refer to an
| operation on matrices, which might make people think that
| AB=BA when that usually isn't true. Mathematics is all
| about re-using terms and pointing out that there are
| differences.
|
| [edit]
|
| Admittedly, the slides do use the term "enumerable" as
| well, so that's another option. When there's a
| possibility for confusion with set theory, you can say
| "computably enumerable" as you suggested.
|
| [edit] Made lots of edits. Hopefully, that's it.
| codeflo wrote:
| It seems to be in style now to try to tear down the public
| perception of past great minds, I recently read a similar article
| about Hawking. And while this article may have some points, I
| don't think the overall framing is fair.
|
| I think everyone with an interest in theoretical CS should work
| through Turing's 1936 paper at one point in their life. For me,
| the important part of that paper is how convincingly it argues
| that the proposed machine model is not just yet another model of
| computation, but a complete model of computation: that everything
| you could reasonably call computation is encompassed by these
| machines.
|
| So there's a finality to Turing's definition of computation:
| these problems are unsolvable not just with this model, but with
| _any_ reasonable machine model. It 's very hard to make the same
| case for lambda calculus, which is (in my opinion) a large part
| of what made Turing's paper so groundbreaking.
| [deleted]
| bo1024 wrote:
| We've been over this. Godel's mu-recursive functions were a poor
| model of computation because it's completely unclear how to
| physically implement the arbitrary-function minimization
| operator. So people didn't see how to build a machine that
| calculates this way. Similarly, there's no clear way how to
| mechanize lambda calculus.
|
| Turing Machines, on the other hand, were instantly obviously
| mechanizable. It was clear that one could build a physical
| machine to run any Turing program without human input. By proving
| that they could simulate the other systems, Turing showed that
| those other systems could be mechanizable as well.
|
| I don't understand why Schmidhuber continues to ignore this
| crucial point.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "For example, it was claimed that Turing founded computer
| science.[...] Turing's 1936 paper provided the "theoretical
| backbone" for all computers to come."
|
| 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?
| jimhefferon wrote:
| The question in the air in 36-ish was something like, "OK,
| clearly we can mechanically compute things like the sum of
| two numbers or the prime factorization of a number. But are
| there other things that can be computed with a discrete and
| deterministic mechanism?" (At the time they called these
| "effective" functions.)
|
| Church had piles of stuff that he and his students produced
| that were computable with the lambda calculus. Basically, all
| of the natural number functions that a person thinks are
| intuitively mechanically computable, those folks had showed
| how to lambda compute. With this evidence, he proposed to
| Godel (they were working together at Princeton at the time),
| who was considered the world's expert, taking "lambda-
| calculable" as a mathematically precise version of
| "mechanically computable." But Godel was notoriously careful,
| and he did not accept the thought as perfectly clear.
|
| That is, they had a subset of the things that could be
| mechanically computed. But was it the entire set? Or was
| there something that some discrete and deterministic
| mechanism could be made to do that would lead to more than
| Church's set?
|
| Imagine you are Dedekind and you are looking at the primitive
| recursive functions and (1) any such function is intuitively
| mechanically computable, and (2) you are able to work out how
| to define a pile of things like prime factorization of an
| integer using this system. You might well conjucture that
| this is it. But we know (and Godel and Church and Turing
| knew) that this is not it, that you need to add unbounded
| search of some kind (this is what minimization does) to get
| more things that are intuitively mechanically computable.
|
| I agree that the minimization operator is not as easy to
| picture with gears and levers as some of the other
| operations. But the issue in 36 was that a person could worry
| that there was even more. Just as minimization is not as easy
| to picture and the need for it didn't hit Dedekind with great
| force, could there be something else out there that we have
| all missed?
|
| That worry disappeared when Godel read Turing's masterful
| analysis. It convinced him that this _is_ what a machine can
| do. He wrote, "That this really is the correct definition of
| mechanical computability was established beyond any doubt by
| Turing.'' Church felt the same way, writing that Turing
| machines have "the advantage of making the identification
| with effectiveness ... evident immediately.''
| earleybird wrote:
| In a nutshell, Church asserted effective computability by
| saying "look what you can do with the lambda calculus".
| Turing took the philosophical approach saying "this is what
| it means to compute". To Godel, Church's argument was
| incomplete. Turing provided the direct argument. Godel was
| convinced.
| generalizations wrote:
| I'm still a little confused. It seems like Turing came up
| with something that works, and clearly fulfills precisely
| what Godel and Church and Turing were all looking for; but
| it also seems like it's a mathematically inelegant
| solution. Is it possible that in the future we'll find a
| way to show that Godel's mu-recursive functions or Church's
| lambda calculus also precisely describe 'what a machine can
| do'? If so, it seems that from a mathematical standpoint,
| either of those would be a better foundation to start from.
| (I'll totally agree that from a teacher's perspective, the
| Turing machine is the better explanation.)
| acchow wrote:
| > Is it possible that in the future we'll find a way to
| show that Godel's mu-recursive functions or Church's
| lambda calculus also precisely describe 'what a machine
| can do'?
|
| See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Tur
| ing_thesis
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > we'll find a way to show that Godel's mu-recursive
| functions or Church's lambda calculus also precisely
| describe 'what a machine can do'?
|
| This is already proven to be the case. Mu-recursion
| (which IIRC is _not_ Godel 's general recursive
| functions, despite what Wikipedia says; Kleene was the
| originator of the mu operator. Godel's general recursive
| functions are defined in a separate, but yet again
| equivalent way that directly extends primitive
| recursion), Turing machines, and the lambda calculus are
| all proven to be exactly equivalent to each other. The
| fact that these three independent approaches to
| computability are all equivalent is why we have strong
| informal justification that the Church-Turing Thesis (a
| non-mathematical statement) holds.
|
| Separately, there's a sentiment that I've seen come up
| several times on HN that somehow the lambda calculus, mu-
| recursion, or general recursion is more "mathematical"
| and Turing machines are less "mathematical."
|
| I want to push back on that. The mathematical field of
| computability is based almost entirely off of Turing
| machines because there are many classes of mathematical
| and logical problems that are easy to state with Turing
| machines and extremely awkward/almost impossible to state
| with the lambda calculus and mu-recursion (this is
| consistent with my previous statement that the three are
| all equivalent in power because computability theory
| often deals with non-computable functions, in particular
| trying to specify exactly how non-computable something
| is). The notion of oracles, which then leads to a rich
| theory of things like Turing jumps and the arithmetical
| hierarchy, is trivial to state with Turing machines and
| very unwieldy to state in these other formalisms.
|
| Likewise the lambda calculus and mu-recursion (but not
| general recursion) provide a very poor foundation to do
| complexity theory in CS. Unlike Turing machines, where it
| is fairly easy to discern what is a constant time
| operator, the story is much more complicated for the
| lambda calculus, where to the best of my knowledge,
| analyzing complexity in the formalism of the lambda
| calculus, instead of translating it to Turing machines,
| is still an open problem.
|
| There is indeed a mathematical elegance to Turing
| machines that makes it so that _most_ of the mathematics
| of computability is studied with Turing machines rather
| than the lambda calculus.
|
| The lambda calculus on the other hand is invaluable when
| studying programming language theory, but we should not
| mistake PLT to be representative of the wider field of
| mathematics or theoretical CS.
|
| EDIT: I should perhaps make clear that if I put on my
| mathematical hat, mu-recursive functions seem like the
| most familiar formalism, because they align with a common
| way families of things are defined in mathematics
| (specify individual members and then generate the rest
| through some relationship). However, I would contend that
| for the majority of mathematicians outside of
| computability theory, the lambda calculus and Turing
| machines seem equally "strange."
| cybernautique wrote:
| I'm convinced that David Harland's Rekursiv[1:] machine
| _is_ the manner by which lambda et al. might be
| implemented at the machine level. Unfortunately, Rekursiv
| seems to have died an ignominious death, with the last
| Rekursiv chip having fallen off the side of a steamboat
| (apocrypha; I remember having read this, but I'm unable
| to find the original citation.)
|
| The Rekursiv advantage is its ability to do recursion on
| the bare-metal. It's described as an object-oriented
| architecture. Its memory was a persistent store of
| objects, with each object having its size, type, and
| position known in memory.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rekursiv
| thom wrote:
| Thanks for this link, really interesting stuff. For a
| while there was a fashion in OS research for orthogonal
| persistence but this is much deeper and more elegant.
| cybernautique wrote:
| Absolutely! As mentioned, I'm very much a novice of
| computer architecture. It kinda blew my mind that
| Rekursiv was unique in its abilities. Also fascinating
| are LISP Machines, which seem to have received quite a
| bit of love from HN already.
|
| If I may ask, from your perspective, what's more elegant
| about Rekursiv's design? Is it the philosophy or
| implementation? I'd also love any links to orthogonal
| persistence!
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I guess I'm confused as to why this is more than simply
| an interesting formalism. Complexity theory and models of
| computation are largely based around the Turing Machine
| model. Lambda calculus is an effective lens to design
| programming languages and prove equivalence between
| programs. We know by way of the Church-Turing Thesis that
| these two models are equivalent. The Turing Machine model
| is both better studied from a computation perspective and
| has much more practical realization; what's the point in
| creating something like this? It feels a bit like silly
| lambda calculus fetishism, but again maybe the value here
| is the actual computation formalism itself.
| cybernautique wrote:
| For me, personally, I really like the lambda calculus as
| a tool to organize and better my computational thinking.
|
| I came into programming/computer science from a
| mathematics degree; I read some old treatises on
| recursion theory[1] and fell in love. I couldn't ever
| quite wrap my head around the Turing Machine formalism,
| but kept at it for a while. Finding Barendregt's paper
| [2] was a huge shock! I grasped it much quicker. So, yes,
| lambda calculus and the Turing Machine formalism are
| equivalent in explanatory power, but there are also
| reasons someone might prefer one to the other. So, yes,
| for me, the value _is_ the formalism.
|
| As to why I think the Rekursiv would provide a good
| platform for implementing lambda calculus on the bare-
| metal, that's entirely due to Rekursiv's memory model
| advantage and the fact that it has a user-writable ISA.
| Why would someone choose to implement the lambda calculus
| on bare-metal? You call it "fetishism," I call it fun!
|
| More generally, I just really like the idea of having a
| machine with a user-writable ISA.
|
| [1] Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective
| Computability: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2738948M/T
| heory_of_recursive...
|
| [2] Introduction to Lambda Calculus: https://www.cse.chal
| mers.se/research/group/logic/TypesSS05/E...
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| FWIW Nothing wrong with having fun with computing, and
| implementing lambda calculus on bare-metal can be as fun
| as any other computational exploration, so good on ya!
|
| Thanks for clearing up that it's the formalism you find
| interesting. Also, to offer a counterpoint, I'm also from
| a math background, but I was more of an analysis person
| (as much as one can be in mathematics where it's all
| related) than an algebra person, and when I did some FP
| research, it often felt like where all the algebraists go
| to play computer science. I feel like analysts are
| underrepresented in PLT (and overrepresented in
| complexity theory!) but this is already going off-topic,
| so cheers.
| cybernautique wrote:
| Nah mate, s'all good! It's great to hear your feedback; I
| am very much of the algebraist spirit myself (I barely
| passed my Rudin-based real analysis course). Our
| experiences definitely align. FP feels much more like my
| favorite parts of math.
|
| Out of curiosity, can you identify any areas in PLT that
| could be made more analyst-friendly?
|
| Intuitively, it feels that PLT is almost necessarily of
| the algebraist; to me, one of the big divides is the
| discreteness of algebra vs the continuity of analysis.
| Would it help if there was a PLT that exhibited a greater
| degree of continuousness? If so, what do you think that
| might look like?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| That's the central argument in the Church-Turing Theory
| isn't it? Church felt very strongly that the difference
| between his and his students' "elegance" and Turing's
| "practical" was a difference only in abstraction and that
| the two models were equivalent and translatable (you can
| write in one abstraction and convert it to the other).
|
| That theory continues to bear fruit as the history of
| programming languages is almost entirely about bringing
| new and "better" abstractions to problems and then
| translating them to "dumber, more practical" machines. We
| have programming languages today modeled directly off the
| elegance of (though now sometimes still a few steps
| removed from being direct implementations of) the lambda
| calculus and mu-recursive functions, and the amazing
| thing is that they work great even given how "dumb" and
| "inelegant" our machines can be in practice.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| > Is it possible
|
| Yes, the set of functions computable with mu recursion,
| or with lambda calculus, is the same as the set of
| functions computable with a Turing machine. (Turing in
| his original paper showed that the set is the same for
| his system and Church's, and the proofs for mu recursion
| and many other systems are well-known.)
|
| > I'll totally agree that from a teacher's perspective,
| the Turing machine is the better explanation.
|
| When I learned this, the instructor did not use Turing
| machines. They used mu recursion. That has the advantage
| that you don't first define a machine and then derive the
| set of functions, instead you go straight to the
| functions. But I agree that Sipser (which I understand to
| be the most popular text today) defines a computable
| function as one that is computed by Turing machine, and
| to my mind that has the advantage of honestly suggesting
| to students what they are about.
| generalizations wrote:
| Thanks, I think I understand now. I thought there was a
| distinction between the mathematical idea of what
| computation is, and the engineering we've invented to
| implement that computation, and so I didn't really get
| the significance/literalness of what you were saying
| about mechanization.
|
| It does seem weird to me though that we're letting our
| engineering limitations determine how we think about
| these things mathematically.
| cfcf14 wrote:
| Wonderful explanation, thank you.
| lordnacho wrote:
| You seem like someone who might have a good book about this
| bit of history? Or perhaps a blog?
| jimhefferon wrote:
| About the Theory of Computation in general. A draft:
| https://hefferon.net/computation/index.html :-)
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Not OP, but I agree with them.
|
| The word computer means multiple things. In one sense it the
| abstraction of universal computation. Imagine a world where
| actual physical computers didn't progress to universal
| computation, but were stuck being purpose built to the
| present day. The field of computer science would be utterly
| different because they couldn't actually _compute_ anything
| with their science. They could just discuss computability in
| an abstract sense. It 'd be like physics without the particle
| colliders or telescopes or lasers.
|
| I think of the founders of computer science more like the
| founding fathers of America, rather than a single guy named
| Turing, but some are more memorable than others.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| The article writes about your point of general computation
| and purpose built computers:
|
| "Likewise, Konrad Zuse never got a Turing award despite
| having created the world's first working programmable
| general computer 1935-41. [...] It was pointed out that
| none of the computers built during the 1940s were
| influenced in any way by Turing's 1936 theoretical paper,
| [...]"
| bo1024 wrote:
| I don't think it's important to quibble over who's overrated
| or underrated among these giants of math and CS who already
| get tons of recognition (I'm glad Schmidhuber brings many
| other historical names into the narrative).
|
| However, yes, I do think that 'mechanization' or physical
| implementation is a crucial piece of Turing's contribution
| that is wrongly ignored in this article. And I think without
| mechanization, there is no CS as we understand it.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I can only repeat my comment from down:
|
| "Likewise, Konrad Zuse never got a Turing award despite
| having created the world's first working programmable
| general computer 1935-41. [...] It was pointed out that
| none of the computers built during the 1940s were
| influenced in any way by Turing's 1936 theoretical paper,
| [...]"
| mcguire wrote:
| I don't believe anyone has received a Turing award for
| creating a working computer.
| obastani wrote:
| As far as I know, Konrad Zuse didn't prove that this
| strategy was a universal model of computation. In
| contrast, Turing proved that his universal machine could
| emulate any other machine, given the right program.
|
| In my view, Turing's contribution is providing a
| plausible definition of computation along with a deep and
| comprehensive theoretical characterization of the
| properties of this model of computation. This is why
| Turing machines form the basis of theoretical computer
| science, and not other models such as lambda calculus. I
| think saying that Turing machines were adopted since they
| were merely more convenient is highly misleading.
|
| I think this pattern repeats a lot: There are many cases
| where you can point to multiple people who invented
| similar ideas around the same time, but it is typically
| the person who provided the most deep and comprehensive
| treatment of the subject that ultimately gets most of the
| credit. This depth is not conveyed in pop science
| attributions such as "Turing invented computation", but
| this doesn't mean Turing doesn't deserve the credit.
| w-j-w wrote:
| I think that proving computers could exist in physical
| reality satisfies this claim very well
| dnautics wrote:
| > I don't understand why Schmidhuber continues to ignore this
| crucial point.
|
| From TFA:
|
| > There is a seemingly minor difference whose significance
| emerged only later. Many of Godel's instruction sequences were
| series of multiplications of number-coded storage contents by
| integers. Godel 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".
| lostmsu wrote:
| It is important for engineering, but as far as I understand
| it is not that important for math. E.g. Godel solved the
| completeness and consistency problems, and Church first
| solved the decidability.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| The OP itself documents:
|
| > Nevertheless, according to Wang,[WA74-96] it was Turing's
| work (1936) that convinced Godel of the universality of
| both his own approach (1931-34) and Church's (1935).
|
| Unless "according to Wang" is meant as "I don't know if I
| believe it", then apparently it's documented that Godel
| himself thought Turing's contribution was major and shed
| important light on the mathematical implications of godel's
| own work.
|
| There's never any one person that invents anything, it's
| always built on work that came before.
|
| Reading the OP, I got increasingly bored and tired... ok,
| what's your point? Yes, clearly Godel and Church especially
| did foundational work without which Turing's work would not
| be possible -- and I don't think anyone denies it, anyone
| with any kind of computer science education is surely
| familiar with Godel and Church. It's not like they are
| languishing in obscurity, they are both very well known and
| respected! Godel especially is widely considered a real
| giant in his fields. I am as confident that neither Godel
| nor Church is going to be forgotten for many generations.
|
| But Turing made important contributions that took important
| steps necessary for the development of CS as a field. It's
| not a mystery or undeserved why Turing's name ends up
| remembered.
|
| The OP's point is just that any singular "inventor" is
| always building on work of may who have come before? OK,
| sure. Boring. So we should never promote anyone as making
| important foundational contributions? Well, people aren't
| gonna stop. Boring.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Not to dispute your point, but note the lambda-calculus-as-a-
| reasonable-machine papers from the last couple of years: it
| turns out (despite the seeming general understanding to the
| contrary in the past) that polynomial interpreters for some
| meanings of "lambda calculus" (including IIRC a weird very
| general one, call-by-need on open terms) are perfectly
| possible, meaning that many fundamental questions of
| computational complexity _can_ be straightforwardly expressed
| in terms of the lambda-calculus machine as well. Linear-time
| interpretation (thus e.g. classes L and NL) seemed out of
| reach last I checked, though.
|
| To echo my other comment here, it's not that Church himself
| knew that. Even five years ago people did not know that. It's
| not a question of priority. But I find it fascinating and
| reassuring nevertheless, as actually programming _e.g._ a
| self-interpreter for a Turing machine--or for general
| recursive functions, or for combinatory calculus--is an
| absolute slog.
| anatoly wrote:
| Can you give some links to these recent papers? Sounds
| interesting. Thanks!
| Grimm1 wrote:
| As someone said to me recently, Schmidhuber may have a few
| points about lack of credit regarding his work but him having
| invented everything to do with modern NNs is a wild claim and
| regardless he has cemented himself as a boor and continues to
| double down. This is just another example of that doubling
| down.
| cs702 wrote:
| Jurgen Schmidhuber has a track record of complaining about
| unfairness in the conventionally accepted view of the
| scientific record, especially in the English-speaking world.
| For instance, he has claimed for years that his own early
| research on AI has been unfairly overlooked or ignored by a
| "conspiracy" (his word, not mine).[a] At one point, the NY
| Times called him the "Rodney Dangerfield of AI research"
| because he doesn't get the respect he deserves.[b]
|
| 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...
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Jurgen Schmidhuber has a track record of complaining about
| unfairness in the conventionally accepted view of the
| scientific record, especially in the English-speaking world._
|
| So, he has
|
| > _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._
|
| Well, credit for the field of CS is already applied now, and
| also yesterday and 20 years ago. It's not like this future
| credit would be the first such, or that it would be more
| accurat (or that it would not feed of the current popular
| views).
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| See also:
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Schmidhubris
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > Similarly, there's no clear way how to mechanize lambda
| calculus.
|
| Is Lisp such a mechanization?
| sytelus wrote:
| Computers we use are nothing like Turing machine and if you
| want to credit one person for computer design than it would be
| van Neumann. Media needs hero worship. It doesn't matter who
| will be hero but they must have one. This applies to every
| field. Every scientist, enterprenuer, artist is overblown.
| Older they are, more overblown they are. The worse case is
| movie actors who literally everyone _knows_ are not "hero" but
| just the human puppets who move and behaves as how directors
| asks and writers dictact, but in the eye of people they are
| literally called "hero" and "star". The people moving these
| puppets are only mentioned in credits who no one reads.
| wedowhatwedo wrote:
| Best I can tell, von Neumann stole the design that bears his
| name from John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. von Neumann
| doesn't seem to deserve as much much credit as he is given.
| I'm not saying he does not deserve credit for his other work.
| toyg wrote:
| Both you and parent are correct: Von Neumann knew how to
| play the game to end up with "the credits people do read".
| SquishyPanda23 wrote:
| > Turing Machines, on the other hand, were instantly obviously
| mechanizable. It was clear that one could build a physical
| machine to run any Turing program without human input.
|
| 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...
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Computer Science is about what computers can do. To decide
| the latter, you have to first decide what a computer is.
| Turing Machines were the first abstractions that intuitively
| captured what it means to compute something
| SquishyPanda23 wrote:
| Sure, if you take "computer" to mean "something that
| computes". In that case it would include humans. There was
| a great deal of research into things that can be
| effectively computed that goes back even before the focus
| of this article. And of course "computer" used to refer to
| humans who computed before the invention of mechanical
| computers.
|
| But it's certainly not the study of what mechanical
| computers can do. Among other things, mechanical computers
| all have bounded resources unlike Turing machines.
| dnautics wrote:
| that's not the case, according to the article. If anything
| the article implies the opposite. Turing machines were a
| re-abstraction of Godel's computational model that provided
| a path to mechanical realization.
|
| Also if you ever work with the turing machine (NFA hooked
| up to an infinite recording tape) it is not at all
| "intuitive" that this construction comprehensively captures
| the world of computation.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Godel's computational model does not intuitively capture
| what it means to compute. Godel himself was unconvinced
| that his model was universal, and it took Turing's paper
| to convince him that his model, lambda calculus, and
| Turing machines were equivalent and universal.
| yesOfCourse9 wrote:
| He does not?
|
| He is crafting a tapestry not being black and white.
|
| They all worked together to refine an overall concept and get
| somewhere useable.
|
| IMO it's the simpler mind that needs a stark black and white
| assignment. Talk about missing the forest for a tree.
|
| Constantly iterating which daddy figure should be on top of the
| mental hierarchy, when clearly it's network effects.
|
| Humanity is still emerging from its mental models of society of
| old.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > I don't understand why Schmidhuber continues to ignore this
| crucial point.
|
| 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?
| jterrys wrote:
| >https://mjosefweber.medium.com/the-first-computers-were-
| huma...
|
| I cringe when I read ill-researched essays like these because
| it informs a relationship between women and computing that
| back then genuinely did not exist.
|
| For the vast, vast majority of women in the field of
| computing at this time, they were nothing more than glorified
| calculators. Yes, there were a few women scientists and
| mathematicians (by few, I mean literally handfuls). Yes, it
| was a male dominated field.
|
| But the overwhelming majority of women working in this
| industry at this time did secretarial style busywork. It
| wasn't glorious. It was underappreciated. It sucked.
|
| These types of essays are a genuine attempt to rewrite a
| history that did not exist. It is literary gaslighting the
| likes of which the article we are discussing right now is
| attempting to rectify.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| And Schonfinkel's combinatory logic ten years earlier (we _are_
| talking priority here, right?) was even more awkward.
|
| There's also the point (mentioned _e.g._ by Wadler in his
| "Propositions as types" talk) that Godel 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.
| dralley wrote:
| Likewise, people dispute that Ada Lovelace was the first
| programmer, because Babbage and Menabrea had previously created
| a few simple example programs.
|
| 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_...
| haihaibye wrote:
| People that say Ada was the first programmer must think
| Babbage came up with the first general purpose computer then
| never wrote any instructions for it.
|
| Maybe the first programmer who wasn't also a hardware
| engineer.
| sebastialonso wrote:
| Jeremy Campbell's The Grammatical Man would like a word with
| you on Lovelace actual documented contributions.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _She didn 't write the "first program" but she was the
| first to understand what computers would be capable of doing_
|
| Or merely the first to express it? I'm pretty sure Babbage
| himself, as the inventor, understood well what computers
| would be capable of doing.
| chmod600 wrote:
| I'm not sure that inventors always understand the
| consequences of their inventions. Often, they are either
| focused on first-order capabilities and neglect the larger
| significance; or focused on visions of the future but
| unable to turn them into useful products in the short term.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Since the notes attributed to Lovelace were written as part
| of some scribe work she was doing for Babbage, what
| indication is there that the notes are her own original work,
| and not something that Babbage asked her to write? Don't get
| me wrong, she was clearly a very intelligent woman.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Defining the first person to do anything is almost futile. No
| one exists in a vacuum and most first were standing on the
| shoulders of technological accomplishments far outside of
| their own field.
|
| That said, I'm sure in the case of Ada Lovelace there is at
| least some element of my misogyny involved.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Awkward typo.
| jhgb wrote:
| > because Babbage and Menabrea had previously created a few
| simple example programs.
|
| That almost sounds to me like saying that the Wright brothers
| "made a few simple flights".
|
| > first to invent foundational control flow structures such
| as loops
|
| I wonder how sigma notation fits into this. Clearly the
| notion of expressing arbitrarily repeated operations using a
| fixed amount of information (which is what a loop is,
| essentially) was known at least to Euler.
|
| Also, the fact that the machine enabled these things in the
| first place (unlike even some of the later machines such as
| Z3) suggests that its designer was either aware of this
| necessity to begin with, or at the very least in possession
| of preternatural prescience. In that case the use of these
| features in some programs but not in others would be not a
| matter of inventing them in the former programs but instead a
| matter of choosing to exploit existing hardware features, or
| declining to do so, depending on what program you're looking
| at.
| bhaak wrote:
| > I wonder how sigma notation fits into this. Clearly the
| notion of expressing arbitrarily repeated operations using
| a fixed amount of information (which is what a loop is,
| essentially) was known at least to Euler.
|
| You can even go further back. Algorithms with loops were
| known already to Babylonian mathematicians. So you don't
| need to resort to preternatural prescience.
|
| The Z3 was not intended as a general computing device but
| as a practical help for engineers. Because of that you
| can't say it was missing something it didn't need to do its
| job. Whereas when Zuse designed Plankalkul loops and
| conditional branches where naturally included in the
| design.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > That almost sounds to me like saying that the Wright
| brothers "made a few simple flights".
|
| Richard Pearse gets written off in the same way to elevate
| the Wright brothers flying accomplishments.
|
| Pearse was just perusing powered flight as hobby in rural
| New Zealand, didn't bother informing the press and didn't
| bother even telling the government until WWII, 40 years
| later, about his flights and engineering designs.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse
| dilap wrote:
| I really enjoyed Stephen Wolfram's mini-bio of her.
|
| https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-
| the-t...
|
| I very much recoginized from that that she had the attitude
| and experience of a "programmer," so I would say she was the
| first programmer, in the modern sense.
| extr wrote:
| Wow, thanks for the link. Really interesting story,
| fascinating to think about what could have been if she
| hadn't died so young.
| e12e wrote:
| "It is desirable to guard against the possibility of
| exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of
| the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject,
| there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what
| we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and,
| secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue
| the true state of the case, when we do discover that our
| notions have surpassed those that were really tenable.
|
| The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to
| originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to
| order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has
| no power of anticipating any analytical relations or
| truths. Its province is to assist us in making available
| what we are already acquainted with. This it is
| calculated to effect primarily and chiefly of course,
| through its executive faculties; but it is likely to
| exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science
| itself in another manner. For, in so distributing and
| combining the truths and the formulae of analysis, that
| they may become most easily and rapidly amenable to the
| mechanical combinations of the engine, the relations and
| the nature of many subjects in that science are
| necessarily thrown into new lights, and more profoundly
| investigated. This is a decidedly indirect, and a
| somewhat speculative, consequence of such an invention.
| It is however pretty evident, on general principles, that
| in devising for mathematical truths a new form in which
| to record and throw themselves out for actual use, views
| are likely to be induced, which should again react on the
| more theoretical phase of the subject. There are in all
| extensions of human power, or additions to human
| knowledge, various collateral influences, besides the
| main and primary object attained." -- Ada Lovelace, 1842
| http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html
| chagen wrote:
| Ada Lovelace's father was Lord Byron?! TIL
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Sadly for her she never knew him. The parents split up,
| he left England and she stayed with her mother. Byron
| died when she was just eight years old.
| rg111 wrote:
| I was surprised to learn that as well.
|
| I learned about it in Walter Isaacson's _Innovators_.
| toyg wrote:
| Look for Sydney Padua's comics for a lot of weird and
| strange facts about Lovelace and Babbage. (To be fair,
| Babbage was much weirder)
| tomxor wrote:
| I started reading "the computer and the brain", derived from the
| unperformed silliman lectures by John von Neumann.
|
| The foreword of this small book is almost as large as the main
| content and does an excellent job of contextualising it in terms
| of more recognisable modern technology; but also in terms of the
| contributions, the cyclical relationship between contributors to
| the field (Chruch, Turing, von Neumann) and how they inspired and
| fed off each other. Admittedly the writer has bias towards von
| Neumanns contributions, yet it is still clear that although he
| was clearly an incredibly smart, inventive and forward thinking
| individual ahead of his time - the parts that happened to landed
| on his lap were a product of collaboration between many brilliant
| people.
| jopsen wrote:
| It's not necessarily about being the first to discover a result.
|
| It's about being able to communicate it clearly. Being concise
| and presenting relatable models is important.
|
| Results have limited value on their own. If they are not clear
| and concise you can't reach a wide audience.
| [deleted]
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > In 1935, Alonzo Church derived a corollary / extension of
| Godel's result by showing that Hilbert & Ackermann's famous
| Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) does not have a general
| solution.[CHU] To do this, he used his alternative universal
| coding language called Untyped Lambda Calculus, which forms the
| basis of the highly influential programming language LISP.
|
| >In 1936, Alan Turing introduced yet another universal model
| which has become perhaps the most well-known of them all (at
| least in computer science): the Turing Machine.[TUR]
|
| Seems like even then, people embraced the imperative
| model(Turing) over the functional model (Church).
| timeoperator wrote:
| Agreed. Steve Jobs invented the first computer.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| The author complained loudly that he didn't get sufficient credit
| for some of his early work in deep learning. Then he received
| credit, but keeps touting his early contributions. I know of no
| one else in the field who spends so much energy on the past,
| rather than present and future work. To be honest, his trying to
| bring Allen Turing down a notch me annoys me.
| teknopaul wrote:
| I smell a rat. There are damn good reasons Turin has been
| posthumously awarded prizes and accolades. A fact I doubt the
| author of this article is ignorant of.
|
| It's makes a lot of sense that kids of the next generation grow
| up with Alan Turin and Ada Lovelace as the heros of the computer
| revolution.
|
| Naturally many other people (perhaps you too one day) have made
| contributions to the world's collective computer knowledge.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| There's some confusion towards the end about Engima and Colossus:
|
| _However, his greatest impact came probably through his
| contribution to cracking the Enigma code, used by the German
| military during the Second World War. He worked with Gordon
| Welchman at Bletchley Park in the UK. The famous code-breaking
| Colossus machine, however, was designed by Tommy Flowers (not by
| Turing). The British cryptographers built on earlier foundational
| work by Polish mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and
| Henryk Zygalski who were the first to break the Enigma code (none
| of them were even mentioned in the movie). Some say this was
| decisive for defeating the Third Reich._
|
| Yes, Turing worked on Enigma and the Bombe to automate breaking
| of the code. However, Colossus wasn't for Engima (it was for
| Tunny) and Turing didn't work on it. This paragraph seems
| confused about which is which.
|
| Also, the fact that the Polish who did the original work weren't
| mentioned in the movie is just one of many things horribly wrong
| with that movie. It's so bad it shouldn't be considered canon.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > It's so bad it shouldn't be considered canon.
|
| 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.
| mannykannot wrote:
| It is not like you cannot tell a good story here without
| embellishing and distorting it.
|
| As it happens, Verity Stobb panned the movie (justifiably,
| IMHO), in her splendidly British style, for much more than
| just getting the facts wrong.
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2015/01/26/verity_stob_turing_mo.
| ..
| vmilner wrote:
| It seems a bit surprising not to mention specifically the
| harder _naval_ Enigma and the U-boat threat in the context of
| Turing.
| cma wrote:
| > Yes, Turing worked on Enigma and the Bombe
|
| Since it wasn't linked, Bombe was based on the Polish Bomba
| machine:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)
| rincewind wrote:
| Canon? Isn't Turing being canonised the problem in the first
| place?
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| In a fictional universe a medium (book, movie etc.) being
| "canon" is the original author's seal of approval claiming
| "this happened".
|
| I think this is a joking extrapolation to the real life, and
| the "author" here is, in best case real life, or as an
| approximation, historians' position based on evidence.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Correct. That's what I meant.
| jagrsw wrote:
| > Polish mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki >
| and Henryk Zygalski who were the first to break the Enigma
| > code
|
| I was in ~2010 or so in the Computer History Museum in Mountain
| View, CA. There was some exhibition related to Enigma there or
| maybe Enigma device on display (I don't remember what was it
| exactly now).
|
| 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.
| tiagoleifert wrote:
| This article is super misleading.
|
| He first says that Church was Turing's advisor without citing
| that Church became Turing's advisor only after both of them
| independently solved the Entscheidungsproblem.
|
| Also, it is only after Turing became aware of Church's solution
| that he wrote an appendix to his work where he cited Church and
| showed that both solutions were equivalent. And even through the
| solutions were equivalent, the techniques employed were very
| different. Church even stated that Turing machines were more
| intuitive and praised Turing's work.
|
| About Turing citing Godel, the problems they solved were related
| but not the same. To put it informally, Godel showed that in
| every useful axiomatic system, there would theorems that could
| neither be proved true or false. To do this, he codified math and
| derived such theorem. On the other hand, Turing showed that there
| was no general way of deciding if a theorem was true, false on
| unprovable. To do this, Turing defined a model of computation
| that we now call Turing machines.
|
| Both Turing and Church defined the first two (and equivalent)
| models of computation. After this, many new models emerged and
| none of them were shown to be more powerful (in relation to what
| it computes) than Turing machines or Lambda Calculus. That is why
| we now believe in what we call the Church-Turing thesis:
| Everything that is computable is computable by a Turing machine.
|
| I see many people in the comments praising the article because of
| the number of citations. This is not a good metric to judge one's
| work. I do not have the time to make a reference to everything
| that I said above, but if one is curious they can find all of
| them in Charles Petzold's book The Annotated Turing. If one is
| interest in this topic, I also recommend the Stanford
| Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the book Godel's Proof.
|
| About the rant the article makes about over attributing a person
| contributions, I can only say that this is a problem that has no
| solutions. One example I like to give is Wiles' proof of Fermat's
| Last Theorem. We say that Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem,
| which is true, but we may also say that Wiles "only" did the last
| step in proving Fermat's Last Theorem, before him many other
| people tried, advanced and contributed to our understanding of
| the problem so Wiles could finally prove it. For me personally, I
| know that every advance in science is made in the shoulder of
| giants and do not bother with attribution, since this is a topic
| we could discuss all day without going anywhere. About the
| particular example of Turing, I am Computer Scientist working
| with Theory of Computation and Computational Complexity who is
| familiar with the history and pioneer work done by Turing and do
| not believe he is oversold, not in the academic community nor in
| popular culture.
| jmartrican wrote:
| Honest question here, how much of the CS theories play a role in
| the history of the practical computers we use today? For example,
| if we play back the history of the the modern computers that we
| use from a perspective of the CPU (with its instruction set),
| RAM, disk, high level languages, and operating systems... do they
| have a foundation in CS theories? Or do these constructs come
| from a more practical engineering basis, void of theory?
| fmajid wrote:
| His cryptographic achievements during WW2 were also vastly
| oversold. Most of the theoretical breakthroughs needed to crack
| Enigma were made by Polish mathematicians, but it was more
| palatable for the British government to put a Brit forward, just
| as they did for penicillin.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I think this is true of Enigma as of start of WWII. But Enigma
| was modified many times over the duration of the war, needing
| not just "number crunching" but genuinely new methods.
|
| 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.
| bobthechef wrote:
| "Little people" seems like a strange choice of words. In this
| case, these were foundational contributions.
| ellimilial wrote:
| The team being 'all-British' for obvious security reasons.
| Which I imagine might have felt like and insult to an injury
| to the 'little people', who, despite cracking the code, were
| not permitted to continue working on it. Making them, you
| know, 'little people'.
| r_c_a_d wrote:
| The brits didn't put anyone forward at all, they kept it secret
| for as long as they could and long after Turing's death.
|
| There is now a memorial at Bletchley Park to the Polish
| mathematicians who worked on Enigma.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Indeed, we basically shoved Colossus in a warehouse
| (scientifically at least - I assume they were used for more
| cold war stuff)
| billyruffian wrote:
| The work at Bletchly wasn't declassified until the 70s. The
| house and the site was a near ruin when I visited in the 90s.
| Hardly a government promoting anyone or anything. There is
| some, quite rightly, national disgust at the way Turing was
| treated which probably plays into his myth.
| simorley wrote:
| If hollywood made a movie about it, then it most likely is
| oversold.
|
| > especially in the Anglosphere.
|
| What does he expect. We've always done this. Whether it is with
| thomas edison, the wright brothers, etc. Each nation/ethnic group
| oversells their achievements and minimizes others. We also did
| that in terms of gender/race. Women and minorities have been
| undersold.
|
| The germans do the same thing. Gutenberg didn't invent the
| movable type. It existed in china, korea, etc for centuries
| before gutenburg.
|
| It's human nature. All nations/groups do this. Imagine how native
| americans feel when we tell them columbus discovered the
| americas.
|
| Everything the author wrote appears valid though. Turing didn't
| invent the computer. He didn't create computer science. He didn't
| win ww2. What he did is solve Hilbert's Decision Problem ( which
| church did before turing ) in a very interesting manner. With or
| without Turing, we'd still have computers, we'd still have
| computer science and we'd still have won ww2.
|
| But sadly, the masses need heroes and heroes are
| created/manufactured by their advocates. Turing for a variety of
| reasons has more advocates than church, godel, etc. And
| unfortunately for the writer, it's an anglo world and our message
| will be the loudest and most visible.
|
| The author states the truth but he is a lone voice in the
| wilderness. A few thousand will probably read his factual article
| while millions will watch the misleading "The Imitation Game" and
| read the misleading articles from the media. It must be
| frustating for the author, but truth is at a disadvantage to
| fiction here.
| amelius wrote:
| Steve Jobs is also oversold.
|
| Same for Elon Musk, etc.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| You can say something similar about a lot of inventions or
| discoveries that happened in a time when many others were working
| in the same area. Light bulbs, powered flight, calculus, the EMF
| laws etc.
|
| History seems to like a single origin story.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Not just history and not just inventions (ok, this quote is
| pretty much history by now too):
|
| "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
| kryptiskt wrote:
| Eh, he worked on important problems and made significant
| contributions. It's a rare case that scientists are actually
| oversold, and that's mostly a case of the public mistaking
| excellent popularizers of science for top scientists. It might
| seem that some gets too much attention, but that is because
| scientists in general aren't known at all and undeservedly
| obscure. Pulling down an icon wouldn't help them get any more
| public recognition, it would just leave the field without any
| publicly known names, like most areas of science (like, what are
| the big heroes of solar physics?).
| umutisik wrote:
| Being the first one to claim a formal proof to a theorem is not
| the most important thing. What's really important is to prove
| things that improve our understanding, which both Goedel and
| Turing have done, in the fields of logic and computing
| respectively.
| rtpg wrote:
| After watching the Imitation Game, I did some googling/trying to
| find out how the Bombe worked. I expected it to not be very
| exact, but I also kinda felt like the entire narrative around
| that history in the industry was just super off!
|
| - The core mechanisms of the machine for running the Enigma
| "quickly" was from the Polish - The machine wasn't even a
| generalized computer!
|
| I just felt really misled! Perhaps the biggest thing is Turing
| probably ended up doing good amounts of contributions to the
| academic/theoretical side and the practical side, but it feels
| like we are missing opportunities to describe the confluence of
| so many people's ideas in this period of history to end up at the
| current "machines that read instructions and then act upon them
| in a generalized fashion, very quickly".
|
| This article seems to be that, and it's super intersting
| jgrahamc wrote:
| The Imitation Game was inaccurate and horrible every way you
| look at it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Historical_...
| formerly_proven wrote:
| What I find so strange about The Imitation Game that all of
| this is pretty well-known; anyone who has skimmed the
| Wikipedia article of Turing and the overview article on
| breaking Enigma knows that the movie is pretty much complete
| horseshit. Most of the alterations in the movie removed
| things that would have made the movie more interesting
| instead of the utterly bland story they made up.
| goto11 wrote:
| Given the movie was a major box office hit _and_ critically
| acclaimed, I suspect the producers knew what they were
| doing.
|
| Just don't expect historical accuracy from a Hollywood
| movie. Cleopatra didn't look like Elizabeth Taylor either.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Cleopatra most likely looked like a horribly inbred
| Greek, seeing as her family tree has a literal circle in
| it.
| arethuza wrote:
| I'm struggling to think of any movies that are really
| historically accurate - the point is to tell a good story
| to get people to watch it to make a profit.
|
| Edit: I'm Scottish so Braveheart is the obvious example -
| entertaining movie but wildly inaccurate and even manages
| to get who/what the term "braveheart" refers to wrong.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Gettysburg and its prequel (Gods and Generals). The
| dialogue and character motivations may or may not be
| accurate, but the battles it depicts are pretty accurate.
| endgame wrote:
| Master and Commander (the Russell Crowe film)? While it's
| a fictional story, I've heard it said that it captures
| the period extremely well.
| rootbear wrote:
| When I visited Bletchley Park a few years ago, I got into a
| conversation with one of the docents about the film and it
| was clear that they had a very low opinion of it there.
| Turing deserved a better film.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| I knew some of the real history beforehand and the movie really
| annoyed me, so I'm glad to hear you were able to uncover the
| facts yourself and had a similar reaction!
|
| 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.
| rtpg wrote:
| > 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!
|
| 100% agree, an unfortunate mentality all too present in
| society, where we tend to build narratives of feeling bad for
| people because are exceptional, and not because they are
| people
|
| See the classic kids story of "oh the store tried to kick the
| hobo out but actually he was a millionaire!!!" How about
| treating all people like human beings even if they aren't
| like... valuable to you
| johncearls wrote:
| I think the attraction to the Turing story is that it is a
| classical tragedy. If what happened to him happened to any
| gay man, it would be wrong. But since it happened to one of
| the greatest geniuses of the 20th century, who may have had
| other breakthroughs that could have pushed mankind forward,
| it is a tragedy. A tragedy for all mankind. Mankind suffered
| a huge loss due to its own moral failures.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Alan Turing's life and work presents an interesting case which
| makes him rather different than most of the heroes of the 'great
| men' meme.
|
| His halting theorem and work on computability is too abstract and
| abstruse for most people to recognize its significance (at least
| until and unless they put their minds to understanding it), but
| his work in defeating the Nazis, and his important subsequent
| suicide, apparently brought on by what we now regard (rightly) as
| harmful bigotry, are the essence of drama. His is a modern
| Campbellian hero's tale begging to be told.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Fac...
| bodge5000 wrote:
| The problem with technically correct allocation of of credit is
| that to be truly technically correct, it gets very messy very
| quickly, as all knowledge is built on other knowledge. The credit
| for founding computer science would be "[absolutely massive list
| of people] and finally of course, the one we call Ung, who
| discovered the wheel".
|
| That might seem pedantic and it is, but you need to define
| exactly where the line is drawn and more so, give a good reason
| why. In fact its not even that simple, WE need to decide and
| agree on where the line is drawn and all of us agree why.
| Otherwise one mans pedantic is anothers important creditation.
|
| Obviously that's not going to happen anytime soon, so for now,
| figureheads like Einstein and Turing do the job. And they do
| certainly deserve credit to some degree. That or we stop giving
| credit completely, which a). seems like a good way to destroy
| knowledge and b). isn't going to happen anytime soon.
|
| Edit: As another commenter pointed out, if Einstein or the like
| were born somewhere else and lived around a different group of
| people, theres a chance he wouldn't become a figurehead, or he
| would make less or more or different discoveries. Therefore,
| theres a third option for creditation, in which everyone who has
| ever lived up until those discoveries has equal credit. If I were
| 60 or so years older, I'd be as much to credit for the turing
| machine as Turing himself. So would you. Of course, this is
| pretty much as good as no credit to anyone at all, but fixing it
| again requires a joint agreement on where the line is drawn
| mbostleman wrote:
| Agreed. The mainstream needs a single or at least smaller list
| of heroes that represent a larger effort. Turing is especially
| suited for this given the oppression he suffered for his sexual
| orientation combined with the impact of lives saved in WWII as
| a result of his work.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Those aren't the only options. We can give credit without
| creating mythic heros. Giving technically correct precise
| allocation of credit is messy, you're right. But so is defining
| what 'tall' means, so the precision is beside the point. You
| _don't_ need to define exactly where the line is drawn.
|
| 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.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| Defining tall doesn't matter so much, a) because we have a
| precise measure of height and b) because we all know and
| fully understand that the definition of tall is completely
| subjective. You might say the same thing about credit, but
| then you also need to accept that for a lot of people will
| gravitate towards these mythic heroes as appropriate credit.
|
| The problem with my wheel example is that it demonstrates the
| absurdity of trying to assign credit to anyone involved, but
| it doesn't quite demonstrate how difficult it is to even draw
| a rough line. Does the inventor of the abacus get credit in
| the creation of computer science? The discovery of
| electricity? And what about all the (comparatively) minor
| inventions and discoveries off the back of those?
|
| As far as I can see it, it either needs to be completely
| subjective, or there needs to be a line. Maybe it doesn't
| need to be incredibly specific, although at that point some
| subjectivity creeps back in
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-15 23:01 UTC)