

The Genius of Turing - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2011/01/genius-of-turing.html

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srean
A less highlighted contribution of Turing is the Good-Turing estimator.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good%E2%80%93Turing_frequency_e...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good%E2%80%93Turing_frequency_estimation)
It is used for predicting the probability of occurrence of objects belonging
to a set of unknown cardinality. For example to answer questions like how many
words did Shakespeare actually know. It finds heavy use in statistical NLP.
[http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/api/nltk.probabilit...](http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/api/nltk.probability.GoodTuringProbDist-
class.html)

A trivia that I find interesting as an Indian is that his parents came from a
background in the executive branch of the Indian government.

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SeanDav
Alan Turing is one of my personal heroes and was a genius of unmatched
ability. In almost all ways he was a man ahead of his time. It is a huge shame
on the British government that his life ended the way it did.

~~~
Dylanlacey
At least they apologized. Well, the modern state did.

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arethuza
Andrew Hodges' excellent biography of Turing left quite an impression on me as
I read it while stuck in the Camusunary mountain bothy on Skye by myself
waiting for the weather to clear - which took about five days!

<http://www.turing.org.uk/book/>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camasunary>

Both are recommended, individually or as a combination :-)

~~~
michael_dorfman
Hodge's biography is great. Also recommended is "The Annotated Turing" by
Charles Petzold (yes, _that_ Charles Petzold) which is a heavily annotated
walkthrough of Turing's paper "On computable numbers, with an application to
the Entscheidungsproblem"), and for the hardcore Turing fan, "The Essential
Turing" by Jack Copeland.

~~~
arethuza
I was also lucky enough to see Derek Jacobi and Jennifer Ehle in the play
"Breaking the Code" - here is a scene from the BBC TV version:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV67Sj2jkVg>

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jacquesm
Two thousand years from now we will still remember the greeks that we know
today, and then there will be a few extra names, I'm fairly sure that Einstein
and Turing will be two of those names.

~~~
dlnovell
We'll also find Turing's prosecution as insane as Galileo's. I suppose the
overwhelming majority of us already do, but hopefully in the year 4000 even
the most conservative of religious folk will consider the "crime" of
homosexuality to be as invalid as the "crime" of claiming that the earth
revolves around the sun. I'm looking at you Uganda!

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david927
It took me a second to realize that was you, John! :-) What an honor to be
part of the documentary on Turing.

I hope the filmmakers are able to do him justice. He's such a giant and it
would be great if more understood that.

~~~
jgrahamc
Yes, it is an honour to have been asked to appear. Haven't started real
filming yet so I don't know what my final role will be, but I'm hoping (having
talked to the writer) that this will be a good film.

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pygy_
The trailer is utterly boring.

No tension, no drama, no rhythm, no appeal to curiosity, no humour, just bored
people enunciating facts and opinions in a bland way.

I wouldn't want it to start with a gloomy "In a wuuurld ...", but still, the
trailers have evolved to their current format for a reason: they trigger
interrest. If you want to bring Turing to the awareness of the masses, you
must fight your attention grabbing peers on their field. Don't bring a knife
to a gun fight.

I hope that they'll fix it soon, and that film will be less boring than this.

~~~
Swizec
Actually the trailer quite piqued my interest. It made me go "Huh" and want to
read Turing's wikipedia page so I wouldn't have to watch the trailer.

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alecco
Very cool. But somebody's line in the trailer kind of implied he broke the
german codes. AFAIK, it was done in Poland just before the invasion. Even the
first "bomba" was Polish.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma>

I'd praise Turing on his last work on self-organizing life. That's still not
very well recognized and might be his most important contribution.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Pattern_formation_a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Pattern_formation_and_mathematical_biology)

~~~
arethuza
I would have thought that the theoretical concept of the Universal Turing
Machine, the first theoretical model of a true universal stored program
computer, would be regarded by most as his most important contribution:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine>

~~~
alecco
Turing explained with mathematical models how there's _life_. It was neglected
and misunderstood for decades.

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Kilimanjaro
Did he really commit suicide? Or was he 'suicided' by scotland yard because he
knew too much?

~~~
barrkel
I think the symbolism of the method chosen, a poisoned apple, shows rather
more subtle thinking than is usually shown by state thugs.

~~~
Dylanlacey
There's some scuttlebutt that this is the inspiration behind the Macintosh
logo. Most likely apocryphal, but nevertheless amusing and fitting.

