I'm currently reading Cryptonomicon because of somebody's recommendation on here. I'm not very deep in just yet, but I'd already recommend it.[0]
Also, the movie for Ready Player One is coming out and the book is alright, too. Though it's a little heavy on the hipster/nostalgic wankery, it's still a good story. Kept me reading. It's also an interesting take on overpopulation, class divides, and the future role of VR. Steven Spielberg is directing the movie, so I'm kind of looking forward to seeing it.[1][2]
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So did Tom Jenning's excellent review of the first edition of that book from 2001. After Tom wrote that review, Andrew Hodges later published an even more comprehensive second edition of that book, on which the movie "The Imitation Game" was loosely based.
Tom Jennings also created FidoNet, published Homocore, and built an electromechanical paper tape driven storytelling machine art installation that incorporated parts of the book and his review.
“. . . Turing was a difficult person: an unapologetic homosexual in post-Victorian England; ground-breaking mathematician; utterly indifferent to social conventions; arrogantly original (working from first principles, ignoring precedents); with no respect for professional boundaries (a ‘pure’ mathematician who taught himself engineering and electronics).”
Aside from creating the most influential protocol for networking computer bulletin boards, Jennings built Wired magazine's first internet presence, wrote the portable BIOS that led to Phoenix Technologies BIOS, ran an early regional internet service provider, The Little Garden (later incorporated as TLGnet, Inc), and maintains an informal archive of Cold War science and technology.
Jennings's installation presents a conglomerated contraption of
antique message devices, connected by cords and wires and plugs
as in an assembly line, all intertwined like the participants in an
orgy. A button placed before the piece invites the viewer to push it,
and doing so the machines come alive. A typewriter with no typist
loudly manufactures the story. On the page a disconnected segment
of inky narrative describes a boyhood in which Turing spoke with
his too-high voice much too often, plus another cryptic bit about
his grave disappointment concerning his treatment by the British
government and something about two men, random fragments
randomly served by a database. Lights blink on another quaint little
device and holes are punched in various rolls of tape that unspool
onto the floor, adding to the already significant pile of coiled dotted
paper. A final note is struck by an odd, tape-recorder-like noisemaker
that seems to bespeak, unintelligibly, a further translation
of the story generated by these melancholy machines.
Story Teller, an installation by Tom Jennings, is an experimental narrative about British mathematician/code breaker Alan Turing told using obsolete media — perforated paper tape, teletype, phoneme-speech, glowing phosphors and ink-on-paper.
The logical mechanisms within Story Teller are in fact exactly "Turing Machines", and through no coincidence its symbols are stored on data-storage perforated tape of his era; with only 128 possible symbols on the tape (though any number of them, and in any order) Story Teller tells a story of Turing, in text, speech, and time. The components of the configuration used for the Turing story are the Model 3 Tape Reader, the Model 31 Vocalizer, the Gallery Controller, and a Teletype Corporation Model 28 teletype, suitably modified to work in the Story Teller system. Other configurations, such as for speech setup only, are possible.
Are there any biogs of Turing not by Hodges? He seems to have created a very particular persona for Turing that doesn't appear to mesh entirely with the very few source documents I've read.
What exactly are you slyly implying but not explicitly stating about Alan Turing, and where did you hear it? Which source documents did you read, and what did they say that contradicts Hodge's book? Links or scans please!
Hodges mentioned in personal email we exchanged that there's some conspiracy theorist who was spreading unsubstantiated rumors that Turing didn't actually commit suicide. And then of course there's another whack job conspiracy theorist jackass's reprehensible homophobic essay "Abusing Alan Turing" which you can search for but I won't link to.
If you're getting your information from that guy (and I certainly hope by "source documents" you don't mean his blog), then I suggest you read some of the other things he's written to get an idea of what kind of a person you're getting your information from. (Hint: add "blacks", "low IQ", "violent" to your search query.)
If instead you like reading actual source documents and the testimony of people who knew Alan Turing first hand, the preface to The Collected Works of A.M. Turing: Morphogenesis (P. T. Saunders, Editor) was written by P. N. Furbank, his close friend and legal executor, and explicitly endorses Hodge's book in a good light:
"Indeed, with the aid of Andrew Hodges's excellent biography,
A.M. Turing: the Enigma, even non-mathematicians like myself have some idea
of how his idea of a "universal machine": arose - as a sort of byproduct of
a paper answering Hilbert's "Entscheidungsproblem"." -P. N. Furbank
I typed in the preface to Morphogenesis, and scanned the drawing inside the front cover by Alan Turing's mother of her son watching the daisies grow:
If for some irrational reason you choose to believe in the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design, then you might not like to hear what Turing thought about that, which P. T. Saunders mentions in the foreword to Turing's collected works, citing what Hodges wrote about and quoted Robin Gandy saying in his "excellent biography":
For Turing, however, the fundamental problem of biology had always been to
account for pattern and form, and the dramatic progress that was being made
at that time in genetics did not alter his view. And because he believed
that the solution was to be found in physics and chemistry it was to these
subjects and the sort of mathematics that could be applied to them that he
turned. In my view, he was right, but even someone who disagrees must be
impressed by the way in which he went directly to what he saw as the most
important problem and set out to attack it with the tools that he judged
appropriate to the task, rather than those which were easiest to hand or
which others were already using. What is more, he understood the full
significance of the problem in a way that many biologists did not and still
do not. We can see this in the joint manuscript with Wardlaw which is
included in this volume, but it is clear just from the comment he made to
Robin Gandy (Hodges 1983, p. 431) that his new ideas were "intended to
defeat the argument from design".
The source documents I was referring to were letters between Turing and his fiancée Joan Clarke; I'll look up a source if you like.
Hodge appears to have Turing as an "out and proud" homosexual (eg https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/revie... "saw no reason why he should hide his homosexuality"), yet his fiancée -- whom he also worked with -- who he spent so much of his time with had to be told in a letter of his "tendencies". If he didn't hide his homosexuality how did his colleague & fiancée not know, or at least how did Turing suppose she didn't know and so need to write the letter.
This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB2e9R7bXCk has an interview with Clarke, and some other colleagues, who say Turing wasn't known by them until later to be homosexual.
Turing appears to have had intimate affection for Clarke, perhaps she was intended by him as a "beard" but it seems as likely from what I've seen that he was bisexual?
Stepping sideways to consider Furbank's endorsement of Hodge. If Hodge were using Turing to attempt to push an idealised homosexual image then it seems -- reading _a_lot_ between the lines -- that perhaps would also be seen as beneficial to Furbank (who I read was a good friend of Forster, whom Hodge tells me in a pamphlet was a closet homosexual, http://www.outgay.co.uk/wdg4.html) either for himself or for his associates.
I'll reiterate, I haven't read exhaustively on this, but what little I have read seems to put Turing's character at odds with [again, what little I've seen of] Hodge's presentation of him. It's like you told me there's no fouling in soccer and the first media that came up in a search was about how there's so much fouling in soccer; it would make me suspect you were perhaps presenting things for other purposes than merely to show the truth.
Thanks for your post. I'm interested if you have more to add.
Also, the movie for Ready Player One is coming out and the book is alright, too. Though it's a little heavy on the hipster/nostalgic wankery, it's still a good story. Kept me reading. It's also an interesting take on overpopulation, class divides, and the future role of VR. Steven Spielberg is directing the movie, so I'm kind of looking forward to seeing it.[1][2] ---
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One_(film)