
Turing - draegtun
http://www.bofh.org.uk/2012/06/23/turing
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michael_dorfman
_But his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the
Entscheidungsproblem” (the one that gave the world the Turing Machine) has a
bug in it. In fact, it has two. The first is obvious enough that I spotted it
when i read the paper for the first time. The second bug is rather more subtle
(but still fixable. It’s okay, the field of computing is not build on sand)._

I'd love to see the identification of these-- it seems quite perverse to
mention them in a blog posting without at least a footnote giving the details.

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evolve2k
Anyone have link to the paper?

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bru
There you go: www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf

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ColinWright
Clickable: <http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf>

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tzs
For those interested in reading “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to
the Entscheidungsproblem”, I recommend doing so via Charles Petzold's "The
Annotated Turing".

Petzold's book presents the paper, with annotations, historical context, and
biographical information. The actual text of the paper is set off with a
different background so there is never any confusion as to whether you are
reading Turing's words or Petzold's annotations, and so you can easily switch
between reading the paper in all its glory, or falling back on the
annotations.

~~~
brown9-2
Thanks for the recommendation, this sounds fascinating. By any chance have you
also read "Godel's Proof" by Ernest Nagel and James Newman?
[http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6dels-Proof-Ernest-
Nagel/dp/0814...](http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6dels-Proof-Ernest-
Nagel/dp/0814758371/ref=lh_ni_t) It sounds very similar in scope.

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zitterbewegung
Well, yes papers do have bugs in them but it takes much more time for people
to figure it out. Thats really missing the point of the paper. There are bugs
you can recover from (typos) and there are bugs that you can't. If you have
too many bugs though then academics will be more and more suspicious.

The main reason these can remain out in the wild is that there are much fewer
eyeballs that look through papers. There are even subtle bugs that pass peer
review. Other people have corrected the bugs. Whats even more interesting is
that other people were approaching the same problem around the same time

* Church with the lambda calculus (with Turing he developed the Church-Turing thesis.

* Emil Post with his Post-Turing (note that he had horrible publishing luck, if his luck was better then we would be celebrating 116 years of Post ).

Also, post seemed to have died of a heart attack for a electroshock treatment
for depression so it seems that he also has an unfortunate demise. At least
Alonzo Church died of old age.

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swombat
Seems like you completely missed the point of the article, which was not to
claim that papers should be bug-free, but to celebrate Turing and also point
out that even the most intolerant "just write it bug-free the first time"
genius could let slip some bugs in a seminal paper (whether they're trivial or
not is irrelevant).

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schrototo
As far as I remember, Turing's original paper had a couple of errors, which is
why he published a correction very soon afterwards.

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simonbrown
Also, it seems strange given that he once said:

    
    
      Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing
      experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no
      real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that
      are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.
    

from <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Turing>

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chj
In turing's time, I believe that is economically correct not to waste computer
time in assembler. You can hire two persons to assemble the program and
compare the output. The computer should be doing the number crunching which is
really the hard part for human. I am afraid the author failed to appreciate
Turing's insight at the dawn of computing.

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gms7777
From a comment on the page, if anyone missed it:

"This story is true, and the conclusion too, except that it was Von Neumann,
not Turing, deriding such a tool as a waste of computer time for clerical
work.

Turing, in stark contrast to Von Neumann[1], understood very well the benefits
of using the computer to work at higher level abstractions. In his lecture to
the London Mathematical Society about his Automatic Computing Engine[2],
Turing sketches out computers not just assembling programs themselves but
actually deriving the programs themselves.

Your disagreement here is with Von Neumann, not Turing. Turing would have been
on your side."

[1] <https://www.google.com/search?q=von+neumann+clerical+work> [2]
www.vordenker.de/downloads/turing-vorlesung.pdf

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pdcawley
A very useful comment, that. I've added an update to the bottom of the post.
I'd always found the assembler story surprising give Turing's history of
mechanising drudge work (the bombes, for instance) and now I know why.

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lcargill99
I heard the explosion for writing an assembler attributed to Von Neumann, not
Turing.

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pdcawley
Yup. My bad. Hashing collision in my brain.

