#turing machine

[life-fucks-us-all-babydoll]

man fuck england they killed alan turing

[lenbryant]

Remembering Alan Turing (the day after his birthday)

(From the Writer's Almanac archive) It’s the birthday of mathematician and logician Alan Mathison Turing, born in London, England (1912), who was a pioneer in the development of the computer. In school, Turing’s instructors tried to get him to study a variety of subjects, but he was only interested in science and mathematics. While a graduate student at King’s College, he wrote a paper called “On Compatible Numbers,” in which he introduced his idea for what was later called the Turing Machine, a computer that, if given enough explicit instructions, could perform step-by-step mathematical operations. He described a machine that would read a series of ones and zeros from a tape, which is the theoretical basis of the way computers work today. During World War II, he served with the British Government Code and Cypher School, where he played a significant part in breaking the German “Enigma” code.

In 1948, Turing became deputy director of the Computing Laboratory at the University of Manchester, where he worked on the Manchester Automatic Digital Machine (MADAM), the computer with the largest memory capacity at the time. He also championed the idea of artificial intelligence, and believed that machines could be created that would mimic the processes of the human brain.

In 1950, he proposed the Turing test: a tester asked questions via a keyboard to both a person and a computer. If the tester could not tell the machine apart from the person after a reasonable amount of time, the machine possessed intelligence. Turing’s scientific works were unfortunately never completed. He was arrested in 1952 for violation of British homosexuality statutes. Two years later he committed suicide.

[suaveotter]

Damn Turing was a fucking savage

[eukytrees]

turing from 2064 read only memories is an interesting character

they (/them) were the first sapient robot, and is presumably responsible for the lilims in va11-hall A (which makes them the best thing to ever happen to that universe. all hail the dorothinquisition)

they're also partially responsible for a slur being made due to objecting to being called "bucket of bolts" by chad "starfucker" mulberry on account of them not having any nuts or bolts in their composition

the slur created, bit brain isn't used in va11 from what i remember.

[ivovynckier]

Are you aware that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) is the father of the computer? Not everybody is but more and more people are since the British government declassified the Enigma files in the nineties. (In the movie “The Imitation Game” (2014), Benedict Cumberbatch played his character.)

I watched this documentary on Turing, much of it filmed on site at Bletchley Park. A former operator of the “Bombe” machines shows how Turing’s code-breaking machine worked.

The Allied Armies invaded Normandy on June 6 1944 because two prerequisite conditions were fulfilled: an unprecedented buildup of soldiers, arms, ammunition, fuel, food and material in England and a successful execution of operation “Fortitude”, an intelligence program that misled the Germans into thinking an invasion would happen more to the north, in the Calais area.

Eisenhower’s staff knew that the Calais deception worked because Turing had broken the code that the German high command used. And they built up a lethal force on the south coast of England because the convoys of merchant ships coming in from America were able to survive the relentless U-boat attacks in the north Atlantic Ocean (the “Battle of the Atlantic”) once Turing had broken the Enigma code.

And thus 165,000 men and 20,000 vehicles landed on the coast of Normandy in a single day. By the end of the month, 1 million soldiers had crossed the North Sea to join the beachhead.

After Enigma, Turing cracked another German code machine, the Lorenz, called “Tunny” by the Brits, in a few weeks. This more sophisticated device converted plain German text directly into a binary, encoded radio signal and was exclusively used by Hitler’s staff and generals. (Enigma messages were transmitted as Morse code once they were encrypted.)

Turing again wanted to mechanize the codebreaking but it would involve 2,000 valves. As valves were then unreliable and no machine with more than, say, 30 valves had ever been built, the army refused the funding that late in the war. The engineer Tommy Flowers built the “Colossus” anyway in his personal laboratory…

The general thinking is that Turing’s contribution shortened World War II by two years. Amongst other things, that meant no atom bomb was dropped on Berlin.

Not that Turing knew about the plans for D-Day, compartmentalized secrecy being the order of the day. He learned about it over the radio as everybody else. Still, by that time, Bletchley Park had gone from 30 code breakers in the Victorian mansion to a 9,000-men operation spread across huts quickly built around the mansion.

And yet, it’s fair to assume he came to work that day on his bicycle wearing a gas mask. Not because he feared a chemical counterattack but because that’s how he fought hay fever during the summer.

But you may wonder why the British state kept a tight lid on Bletchley Park and the codebreaking effort once the war was over. This happened because the Russian army stole Tunny machines as it swept through Germany. They reconfigured them a bit to handle the Russian language with its Cyrillic script but otherwise used them without reservations. As a result, during the first years of the Cold War, the West listened in on Stalin’s conversations with the Russian army.

Economically, the strict secrecy was a unfortunate move. Great Britain did not develop an IT industry after World War II. Over time, valves got replaced by transistors and Silicon Valley became the center of the IT world after Vannevar Bush, a veteran of the Manhattan Project, laid the groundwork. (Matthew Modine played him In Christopher Nolan’s movie Oppenheimer” (2023).)

Turing died in 1954 at the age of 43. Strangely, in this documentary, Professor of Philosophy (read: Logic) and Turing biographer Jack Copeland doubts the traditional hypothesis - suicide. Still, he was found dead on his bed with cyanide in his body and a half-eaten apple on his nightstand. Where did the cyanide come from if the apple wasn’t laced with it…?

[thedetectivethepirate]

He deserved so much better.

[strixton]

i feel tumblr would appreciate my answer to my turing machine homework in computer science

it's a completion grade, so the professor said i could draw garfield and get it right, so i did just that

[alextfish]

I am here to tell you about a silly accomplishment of mine, via the medium of an even sillier song.

(The full video, paper etc are linked from https://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Magic/ , but I like the silly song best. And it's only 2 minutes long.)