

Turing's Universal Machine voted most important past British innovation - choult
http://www.topbritishinnovations.org/

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jgrahamc
The curious thing (when compared to the other things that were being voted
for) is that the Universal Turing Machine is an _idea_ and not a device in any
practical sense. It's probably lost on most people that Turing never intended
his machine to be built, it was entirely thought up to answer a question in
mathematical logic.

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greenyoda
Nor _could_ one ever be built, since Turing Machines have features like
infinite tape memories, which would be rather difficult to manufacture.

One could argue that Turing's contributions to cryptanalysis (e.g., breaking
the German Enigma cipher) might have had an even greater effect on the world:
in the grand scheme of things, defeating Nazi Germany was probably more
important than paving the way for computers and the internet.

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jiggy2011
If you just feeding data from the internet into the CPU that's a pretty
fricken long tape!

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jerf
Most important British innovation, heck, a case can be made that it is the
single most important _human_ innovation ever made. It hugely impacted
everything from the purest of mathematics to the most mundane of modern
practical concerns. As always, he stood on the shoulder of giants, of course,
but he saw further.

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SeanDav
Don't agree here. You have to set a category, unless you are claiming that the
Turing Universal Machine is a greater invention than the transistor, or
penicillin or the wheel or fire or writing etc etc.

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jlgreco
I'd say it is more important than all of those, save writing. Both writing and
the idea of mechanical computation represent fundamental leaps in human
development. They change _what_ we are, not just the comfort in which we live.

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Turing_Machine
Right. Penicillin was important, but there are other antibiotics. The
transistor was also important, but there are alternatives that might have been
used (e.g. techniques based on optics). The theory of computation is
absolutely fundamental.

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SeanDav
Charles Babbage had a working computer long before Turin. If he could have
implemented it in transistors or even valves rather than mechanical relays how
much further would we have been today?

The way I see it, you don't need to understand the theory of computation to
solve probably any problem that is solvable via computation. Given, it would
be potentially far less efficient but not fundamental.

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jlgreco
Without the common mathematical language necessary to reason and talk about
computation in the general case, and Babbage-linage programmers would have
been at a severe disadvantage. The fact that general purpose computers only
got a resurgence decades later, well after the period of time that the
hardware and resources would have supported the construction of a general
purpose computer, demonstrates the necessity of the concept.

Could Babbage have created the analytical machine without the theory of
computation? Sure. And Hero of Alexandria built a steam engine. Sometimes, the
mere ability to create a device is not sufficient. You need the ability to
step back and realize the profound nature of what you have just done, and the
ability to create a language with which to communicate this realization to the
world. Babbage and Ada only managed but a fraction of that, and I do not
believe that completing a physical prototype was some sort of last missing
piece in the puzzle.

If you want someone other than Turing to point the finger at, then Claude
Shannon is next in line _waaay_ before Babbage.

 _(also, it is not my understanding that the analytical engine was to be an
electromechanical relay machine. do you have a source for that?)_

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mich41
_Without the common mathematical language necessary to reason and talk about
computation in the general case, and Babbage-linage programmers would have
been at a severe disadvantage._

Not sure about that.

The Analytical Engine was capable of arithmetics and conditional branching.
Code and input data were to be read from punched cards.

Such machine was quite practical and if Babbage managed to build it, it would
immediately get used for some number crunching - scientists and businesses
would love a calculator which can autonomously eat streams of data and perform
boring computations on them.

Babbage and Lovelace were aware that AE can be used to process numerically
encoded non-numeric data, so it would also find uses in text processing.
Sooner or later somebody would invent Fortran and COBOL (after all, early
compilers were pretty much string rewriters) and we would be headed to land in
same place we actually did.

Only CS PhDs would waste their time on attempts to algorithmically solve the
halting problem instead of "wasting" it on the P=NP debate.

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jlgreco
The machine would have been capable (it would have been Turing complete after
all) and they had some ideas of what it could be used for, but I think you are
forgetting that you are standing on the shoulders of giants. Those
hypothetical programmers would have lacked any common mathematical language
with which to talk about computation and thus, lacked an abstract model of
computation entirely. They would have been able to program particular machines
to some degree but, unless someone was spurred on to replicate the work that
Church/Turing/etc decades earlier (in fact, their work would undoubtedly be
pre-performed out of necessity), they would lack a solid abstract model of
_what computation is_ and what is necessary for it. Until that theoretical
work would be done, all of those programmers would just be taking wild stabs
in the dark with ad hoc methods and superstition spawning intuition. Engineers
without Newtonian physics, no common language beyond punchcards and common
english. They could build great bridges sure, but lacking any semblance of a
formal notion of computation they would be crippled compared to what they
could be. They would be at a distinct disadvantage.

Hell, half the reason they couldn't _build_ the thing is because they lacked
the theoretical background that would have put it within their grasp. With no
switching theory, without the insight of Shannon, the machine was to be an
unwieldy system of gears. It is hard for the modern mind to fully internalize
just how much framework they were lacking.

The extent to which the standard HN _"formal CS educations are worthless"_
battle cry is true is only the extent to which we benefit from those who came
before us.

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mich41
CS is much more than the UTM.

UTM is a dumb and completely impractical model of computation. Thanks to its
simplicity it is a handy tool in (un)decidability proofs and some very general
computational complexity reasonings.

And that's all. Numeric computations happened on real machines. Graph
processing happened on real machines. Text processing happened on real
machines. Structured programming, procedures, programming languages, compilers
- all happened on real computers.

Using (or even thinking about using) the UTM for any practical application
would be a huge PITA and nobody ever does it. We only know that it's
"possible" and hence if we want to prove something general about all possible
computation, it suffices to do some magic with the UTM.

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jlgreco
I don't think you are getting it. In Babbage's time they were not merely
missing the UTM. They were missing damn near all of mathematical logic (even
set theory only really came about around the time that Babbage died) and meta-
mathematics was incredibly immature at the time. Forget answering questions
about CS; they could not yet _ask_ the questions.

They could have pulled some impressive stuff off I am sure, but it would have
all been intuition and stabbing in the dark. The tools necessary to
structurally reason about algorithms had not yet been created, nor even the
tools necessary to create those tools...

Ada had the notion that the Analytical Engine was something special, something
more than just a calculator... but that was conjecture based on genius
insight. To actually discuss that idea in a rigorous manner would require
several more decades of advances in mathematics.

Could they have programmed? Yes, _obviously_. That's not even hypothetical,
since they _did_. Would they have been at a distinct disadvantage? Without
anything reasonably resembling modern mathematics, absolutely.

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mich41
You don't need logic, set theory, Turing machines or any meta-mathematics to
build practical software.

When I was ten, I had no idea about any of this stuff and yet when somebody
showed me how to do arithmetic, variable assignments, comparisons and goto in
QBasic (pretty much equivalent of Babbage's machine) I was able to write a
simple drawing program and tic-tac-toe which checked whether one of the
players won.

Add some IO and I would write a program which reads series of transactions and
computes your bank account balance. Tell me what a matrix is and I would
implement LAPACK for you.

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jlgreco
You absolutely need those things for a great deal of modern programming. _All_
modern programming? No, but a great deal.

Without that they would have been at a disadvantage. I don't see what is so
hard about this concept to you.

Regardless, the simple historic fact remains that Babbage and Ada were both
unable to build the machine, and unable to verify their suspicion that the
machine was special, and unable to effectively communicate to their peers this
suspicion. The prerequisite math for all three of these tasks did not yet
exist.

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jlgreco
I'm not quite convinced that is what I would call an "innovation" per se, that
is not quite how I think of the word; accepting that though, it is clearly a
good choice.

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stygianguest
Somehow this would be the first election where an army of botnets voting seems
appropriate.

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Bud
I think what's also cool about this page is that the MINI was #2. The Turing
Machine barely beat out the MINI, 18% to 17%.

[http://www.topbritishinnovations.org/PastInnovations/BMCMini...](http://www.topbritishinnovations.org/PastInnovations/BMCMini.aspx)

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notahacker
It looks like a poll hijacked by Mini and steam train enthusiast groups. The
Mini and Mallard were nice pieces of engineering, but you'd have to be a
pretty hardcore fan to place them on a pedestal above the jet engine or
medicinal use of penicillin or decoding DNA (or even relatively mundane things
like radar and ultrasound) as significant examples of innovation.

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Bud
I would have to reluctantly grant this point. ;) Although they did make a
fairly good case that the MINI did contain some innovations which were
significant at least within the auto industry. (Disclaimer: I sure do like my
MINI.)

I think Tim Berners-Lee should have ranked higher, too, btw.

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babesh
Babbage machine predated Turing by a good number of years.

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14113
Babbage's machine was really a glorified calculator. Turing's conceptual
machine is a way of representing what computation fundamentally _is_.

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danso
If you had told me there were five inventions by the Brits (in the last 100
years) greater than the World Wide Web, I would've been stumped.

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Turing_Machine
Here's my take: without the theory of computation, there wouldn't _be_ a web,
nor would there be many of the other innovations on the list (e.g., CT scans).

