News Computing museums team up for Turing centenary

Three computing museums, including TNMOC in the UK, have teamed up to celebrate Alan Turing's 100th birthday.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2012/02/29/computing-museums-team-up-for-turing/1

 

I thought I'd just add a comment to further educate anyone who cares.

I could be wrong, but from what I know Turing did relatively little work on artificial intelligence. We frequently hear about the Turing Test, but there are many theoreticians who have conjectured before their time (for example, John Nash of the Nash Equilibrium conjectured public key cryptography decades before it was established by Rivest, Hellman, Diffie etc). The Turing Test is likely more well known to sci-fi buffs, due to the numerous films which mention the Turing Test (of which some are mentioned).

Almost certainly his concept of a Turing Machine, as well as the Turing-Church thesis have been far more important to the development of modern computer science.

The former defines the conditions for something to be called a computer. Turing defined it in terms of states and a sequential access tape - though this definition is mathematically identical to a machine with random access -- for reasons that should be obvious. All modern computers and programming languages are examples of Universal Turing Machines (Turing Machines that take Turing Machines as their input). Thus far, no model of computation has been devised that can compute anything a Turing Machine cannot (see below).

The Turing-Church Thesis states that any algorithm can be computed on any Turing Machine. This is not a theorem of any kind, because the definition of an algorithm is relatively informal -- but the result is still extremely important. The knowledge that if there is an efficient solution to such problems as P=NP or integer factorisation, it can be implemented on current technology is certainly an important step towards deciding those goals.

 

Quite a tragic ending for someone ahead of his time. No doubt he could have contributed much more to the field. At least his achievements are being honored now, albeit posthumously.

 

Oh, I thought I knew your name from somewhere (probably the bit-tech article). I visited the museam last summer (although not the first time I've visited). (On a very minor note, the house I used to live in was actually requesitioned in a similar way during the war, for training polish paratroopers; it was station XX, twenty, to bletchley park's station X). It's a good day out for anybody, there's a fair amount of stuff, not just the museam of computing.

It is true that turning was a Mathematician first and foremost although at that point in time Computer Science would probably come under that umbrella. If I had to make one observation it would be that actually the Poles did far more towards cracking the enigma than we did.

 

I went to Bletchley last year for the fireworks night, was given a tour during the day round the place.

Incredibly interesting, and I found out soooooo much I didn't know before, such as the massive help the Poles were.
Regardless of exactly how much he did etc, it's still terrible what happened to him.

 

I apologize, the comment was rude.

I realize that the article was news, not a biography - my post was mainly to educate those who did not already know about some of Turing's work -- past Enigma and the Turing Test.

I didn't mention morphogenesis because I had not heard of Turing's work on it. He was clearly quite the polymath.