

Beware the Alan Turing fetish - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2011/11/beware-alan-turing-fetish.html

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patio11
The media has a strong, _strong_ bias towards established narratives. (So do
all of us, but they're in the professional business of telling stories, so
it's relevant that one can tell in advance what collection of observations
makes a "good story.")

"Our benighted ancestors had it all going well but then they did really bad
things due to a malign corrupting influence and we're still suffering as a
consequence" is a _very_ powerful narrative. It's so powerful that if you're
telling a story which has e.g. all the elements but the snake that you'll
invent a bloody snake because everyone knows this story needs a snake.

~~~
zeteo
I agree that this has nothing to do with Turing himself and everything to do
with journalistic low standards. However, I don't think it's an effort to fit
Turing into the "forbidden fruit" story, and I really see no snake coming up
in this. It's just sensationalism: making each bad story really bad, and each
good story really good.

It's hard to explain Turing's achievements to non-technical readers anyway.
The documentary calls him a codebreaker, which is not exactly why they've
named the Turing Award in his honor. But it's much easier to put across to the
general public the point about Enigma (he helped win the war!) than about
computability (huh?).

~~~
eru
And to be fair, the code breaking machines (bomba) were important early
computers.

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stiff
Turing's work was almost always purely theoretical and his genius very much
lied in his ability to think at a level of abstraction way higher then most of
us can handle; the idea that he might have jump-started a new industrial
revolution only seems to indicate that whoever came up with it had no
understanding whatsoever of what Turing did besides hearing that Turing was
"the father of the computer". This is so wrong I am surprised somebody went as
far as to write an article about this, someone should just tell the Sunday
Times guy to maybe do his homework next time he utters some sentences to
thousands of people. Turing had more in common with Newton or Einstein (I
think the mental leaps he did for example in his work on the Entscheidungs
problem are almost of this order, even though again the abstract nature of his
work make its applications and implications narrower and harder to see), then
with Henry Ford or Thomas Edison.

~~~
tommorris
Absolutely. What the newspaper piece seems to ignore is there's no reason to
suppose that if Turing had lived longer he would have become the British Bill
Gates rather than, say, enjoyed life as an academic computer scientist or
mathematician?

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dspillett
I'm always irritated by the fact that these documentaries tend to paint hime
as _the_ codebreaker when that part of his work was very much a team effort
with other mathmatical minds and the electrical/physical engineers that
created and maintained the quipment they used.

I feel this is wrong on two counts: it means very few people know of the other
people working at Bletchly Park despite their significant contributions, and
it ignores his "solo" work in the areas of computation/information that was
incredibly significant in building up to the technological revolution that has
taken place over the last fifty years or more.

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andyjenn
Thanks for the notice, will watch that tonight.

Sounds like an example of mediocre journalism picking up on well worn themes:
brilliant outcast genius, untimely death and potential riches lost,
extrapolated and simplified.

As an aside, and I don't know if this will be covered in the programme, there
was an interesting report on Radio 4 some time ago about the treatment Alan
Turing went through to "cure" his homosexuality. Whilst I had previously
thought this only to be barbaric acts by small minded people, the report
suggested some of the medics genuinely thought that this science could
actually change him and be a force for good.

Doesn't really change much, but it altered my views...slightly.

~~~
wladimir
The barbaric act, in my mind, is that they tried to change his sexual
orientation at all, and went to such lengths to try that. Just because it was
supposed to be somehow "bad" to be homosexual, not because he was a danger to
anyone.

~~~
cobrausn
Sorry, but how is this barbaric if the person undergoing the 'treatment' wants
to undergo it? There are a lot of men who want to be women, I'd imagine there
are some homosexuals who wish they were straight (and vice versa).

If we had the capability to alter sexual orientation, and the person wanted
to, what's so wrong with that?

~~~
epo
A fine example of the banality of being contradictory for the sake of it.
Turing was coerced into 'treatment' (the alternative being prison, a grim
prospect for a man like Turing), consequently 'barbaric' is spot on as a
description; doubly, trebly so, given his contribution to the war effort.

What are you going to try next? How about quibbling with something being
called murder because the 'victim' might have wanted to die?

~~~
cobrausn
I'm not being contradictory for the sake of doing so, I'm being contradictory
because your assertion is incorrect - many people might actually wish to alter
their sexual orientation, and there is nothing 'barbaric' about it, provided
we have the ability to do so humanely. Being forced into it is obviously not
what I was referring to.

Your second point is called 'assisted suicide', and people do quibble about
the difference.

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skrebbel
Ooh, I love "what if" stories!

Hey, if Turing had died even _earlier_ , maybe the Valley would be in Germany!

And I'd be eating pretzels and bratwurst.

~~~
Retric
There was a lot of code breaking that had nothing to do with Turing. The
enigma was broken because some polish mathematicians showed up with pictures
of the device and a method of deciphering it. And for comparison just about
all of Japan's high level codes where broken by the US. So, while Turing was
important, I suspect vary little would have changed if he had not been part of
the decoding efforts. (Largely because you can't use information gained from
decoding messages all that often or they notice and change the codes.)

~~~
mietek
Rejewski[1], Zygalski and Różycki have actually been reading the Enigma
messages for over six and a half years before the war began. They built
mechanical devices called "bomby kryptologiczne", known outside Poland as
"bombas", which then inspired the British "bombes".

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski>

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saljam
How timely! Just this morning I learnt a few anecdotal factoids about Turing's
stay in Manchester, and his quarrels with the "old engineering guard"
(Williams and Kilburn.) This comes from one of the professors who just retired
from the University -- where Turing worked for a few year on the Manchester
SSEM, also known as the Baby. It was the first stored program computer -
effectively the first Von Neumann computer
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Baby> <http://www.computer50.org/>)

The Baby was built by Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn. They were both
engineers who believed they were building a machine on which to do real
science. At the time the only way to program the machine was by flipping
switches and hacking away in binary machine code. Alan Turing was hired to
come to Manchester and provide a sort of higher-level language so that
scientists can use the machine, a sort of an assembler if you will.

However, it turned out that Turing didn't mind all this bit twiddling at all!
Instead of doing what the rest of the engineers were expecting, he ended up
writing all sorts of AI and maths programs to work on problems he thought were
interesting. Problems, which the "old guard" thought of as mere games. They
were trying to do science, while this guy is just playing! Oh how the world
changed... This lead to a great deal of friction between him and the
engineers, the remains of which can still be seen today in Manchester. For
example, none of the CS buildings were named after him -- the Alan Turing
building was completed in 2007 and became the home of Mathematics and
Theoretical Physics, but not CS.

Some have suggested that in addition to the above, his sexuality didn't
practically help when dealing with the alpha-male 1950s engineering types he
was dealing with, but let's not go that way...

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _his sexuality didn't practically help when dealing with the alpha-male
> 1950s engineering types he was dealing with_ //

I imagine it may well have been because in commong with other genius
mathematicians he was [borderline] autistic.

Anyone else want to share a stereotype?

\--

Not completely related reading:
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7736196.stm>

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ggwicz
Turing allegedly killed himself by putting cyanide in an apple in and eating
it. That is, according to urban legend, why the Apple logo has a bite taken
out of it.

Probably entirely false, but a neat idea.

And re: established narratives, I think often times the people reporting on
great minds like Turing, Tesla, Einstein, etc., just can't even fathom their
abstraction and the level they think on.

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agentgt
"At the same time an Alan Turing fetish means we might overlook the other
great people who worked in early computing" --- They could have used many
other words instead of fetish. I have to wonder if the word subconsciously
chosen for the history of his personal life... I hope not.

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tripzilch
If Turing had been still alive he'd have solved P?=NP by now! ;-)

