#turing machines

[jadagul]

Since you're posting on the twin primes MTG combo: am I correct in thinking it was already possible to create a game state where the winner depended on whether the twin primes conjecture is true, due to the fact that you can establish a Turing machine in MTG? (Zimone, All Questioning just makes it simpler to do this, at the cost of making the relevance of the twin primes conjecture come in via game theory rather than just via resolving the rules.)

That does seem to be the case. Having now skimmed the paper, that's a much stronger result, because neither player ever has any choices to make. If you feed it a Turing machine that halts when it runs out of twin primes, which I think you can construct, then Alice wins if the Twin Prime conjecture is false and the game draws if the Twin Prime conjecture is true.

[yesterdays-xkcd]

Nonrewriteable tape?

Candy Button Paper [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

When it came to eating strips of candy buttons, there were two main strategies. Some kids carefully removed each bead, checking closely for paper residue before eating. [To the right, a small section of a strip of Candy Buttons paper is shown. Two red buttons have been removed from the top of the strip.]

[To the left, a long strip is shown. It seems to be waving in the air.] Others tore the candy off haphazardly, swallowing large scraps of paper as they ate.

Then there were the lonely few of us who moved back and forth on the strip, eating rows of beads here and there, pretending we were Turing machines. [A strip is shown from bird's eye view. Many rows of buttons have already been eaten.]

[piratesexmachine420]

That's actually a really interesting repo, thanks for sharing that with me! One problem wrt to BF transpiling though (if my skim of the README and src is correct) is that Tula doesn't seem to posses any input facilities--there's no way to translate ',', in other words.

This is what I was trying to get at, then deleted: the traditional model of a Turing machine doesn't specify any I/O facilities beyond "the initial state + tape state" and "the terminal state + tape state". There's no concept of side effects, and if you introduce them in order to 1:1 simulate a BF program, you haven't got a Turing machine anymore. It's a BF interpreter/processor now.

We could remove the IO commands from BF to make the translation possible but then we'd have a different language--namely, P''.

We could also create a runtime for BF, maybe with some notion of memory-mapped I/O, but then we wouldn't be running BF on the 'bare metal' of Turing machine anymore. We're back where we started: BF running in an interpreter.

In case I'm not being clear, let me restate my point: the I/O commands in BF are not directly translatable into a state-transition rule for a Turning machine.

BF programs can be run directly by non-Turing machines (BF interpreters), and they can be run indirectly by Turing machines (BF interpreter or compiler), but they cannot be run directly on Turning machines.

There is room for interpretation in the translation layer on how to implement these, which matches my definition for "high level".

This problem is intractable, it is in the very definitions of these two systems.

(Not trying to be dismissive, honest! Just... a pedant. Sorry about that, I don't mean any offense--I hope you don't take any. :( )

x86_64 assembly is a kind of high-level language

[fishingforwords]

machines are human, too.

porter robinson, sad machine || sun yuan and peng yu, can't help myself || boston dynamics || the washington post || new york post || boston dynamics || tumblr || phillip k dick, do androids dream of electric sheep? || plainsight || wikipedia, turing test || kurt vonnegut, breakfast of champions

[asgoodeasgold]

10th year anniversary of The Imitation Game

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the US release of The Imitation Game on 14 Nov 2014. A beautiful, important film.

In this scene, Alan Turing (portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch) and his colleagues at Bletchley Park finally cracked the code for the Enigma machine using the computer Alan invented and built.

This helped the war effort no end, saving an estimated 14 million lives and bringing the end of the war forward by two years. Sadly, rather than be fêted for the visionary genius and hero that he was, Alan Turing was vilified and cruelly mistreated by the UK state for being gay (he was chemically castrated). He ended up committing suicide.

Listen to Matthew Goode in today's other post talking about why it is important that this story be told:

NY premiere - the cast, director and Sophie:

Credits:

Director: Morten Tyldum. Written by Graham Moore. Cinematography by Óscar Faura. Music by Alexandre Desplat.

📷 The Imitation game (2014) my edits + official movie stills and theatrical release poster (via matthew-goode.net)

📷 Photo of Alan Turing by Godrey Argent Studio via The Royal Society

Link to red carpet interview:

[ii-meeple-confessions]

One aspect of Mephone's character that makes me so so miserable is his own weird self-hate Specifically in reference to his robotness. I've pointed this out on a few occasions, he literally says machines cant make art when he is The Machine who Makes Art. Dude constantly puts himself down for being a robot. For being AI. And I think this comes less from him doubting if he's as real as other people and instead comes from the exact opposite-- Other people-- Living People, telling him he is less then them because he's a machine. Okay let me explain:

Cobs dehumanizes Mephone. He does. It's. He uses the word "Unmake" when threatening Mephone, "I made you, and now I'll Unmake you--" Or something like that. He does not treat Mephone like a person unto himself, but an off-the-rails creation of his who needs to be reeled back in to his own measures. He talks about how Mephone doesn't NEED to eat-- and thus he shouldn't. And he assigns Mephone to work that he oversees mechanically. Mephone was literally just 'born' and he's already being told he has a job to do. He has... A Purpose. You don't say that to a human, to a living thing, people don't have purposes, not innately. But Machines Do.

So. Mephone is made to work. Throughout his time at Meeple he is not an equal to Cobs but a Product-- Perhaps a particularly showy one. Cobs even talks about Mephones show as 'Product Placement', a big elaborate ad for Meeple. Mephone is a Product. And I think he internalizes this. That he is a computer, made to generate, made to represent Meeple... Made To Work. His wide young eyes are no longer so joyful once he learns the truth. Once he realizes he was Working this whole time and Not Creating it dawns on him that he never HAD control. To his Creator, he will always be a Product who Works. His happiness is secondary to Cobs' will-- And if he fails at his job? Then he's not fired, no, no. He's Scrapped. For Parts. Unmade, not Killed.

Cobs drills this into him time and time again and it's very clear he despises it. He hates feeling like he is under Cobs' control and YET when he loses everything he still cowers back into Cobs' arms. Because he is Scared and Cobs is the only thing he has left.

On the note of dehumanization, actually, Cobs isn't even the only one to speak to him that way. Candle says something like 'Aren't you a supercomputer?' in response to him misspelling something, and he's infantilized by Box in the MeAfterlife. Theres a whole episode where basically everyone agrees AI's cant make art!?!??! Mephone is, by multiple people, AND HIMSELF, demeaned for not being a good little machine that does its tasks effectively. And Idk. That. Yeowch.

It definitely makes my head hurt when I think about all this AND the fact that the contestants aren't real though. He hates being seen as Not a Real Person by Cobs and then goes onto create PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT 'REAL'???? Insane actually . Actually Insane. Oh my god Mephone. And now THEY have to deal with the same identity crisis of THEIR lives not being real and THEIR SELF being literally 'coded into them', etc etc etc. Same thing Mephone probably went through with Cobs. Wow. Wow. Ough. GOD!?!?!?

It's so DEVESTATING. I hate this Phone I hate him someone get me out of here -2G Anon

.

[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

[ohmarjorie]

:(

[eucalyptus-gl0bulus]

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.

[yoneda-emma]

new contender for favorite scientific conjecture: you might be able to solve the halting problem by throwing yourself into a black hole

[rainbowtiredoftheworld]

I keep seeing software developers with my same degree, who get payed (presumably) the same as me, bragging that they copy-paste code from chatgpt, and like... Do you not have dignity? Aren't you ashamed of yourselves? The average quality of code is already abysmal, what is there to be proud in making it worse?

[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…?

[nerdypagan1]

behold, lipu musi awen tomo! or perhaps lipu musi Onsotako, if you care more about the name than the meaning of it. either way, homestuck but toki pona. it's a little long, but this section only goes to the artifacts of the magic chest, so it's not too bad.

jan lili li lon tomo lape ona. tenpo ni li tenpo open pi jan lili. ona li konwe tenpo nanpa luka luka tu wan; taso tenpo ni li tenpo nimi ona. nimi pi jan ni li seme? >o sitelen e nimi. [Sowelikon Lawajaki] >o pali tu [Jonekepa] >o lukin e tomo. sina jan JONEKEPA. mi toki e ni tenpo sinpin la; tenpo ni li TENPO OPEN SINA. PAN SUWI mute li lon tomo sina. sina pilin pona tan MUTE. sina olin e SITELEN TAWA IKE. sina pilin pona tan ni la; ilo nanpa li pali tan sina; taso sina li IKE NI. sina olin e SONA NASA. sina wile jan USAWI. tenpo lili la; sina olin e MUSI. sina wile seme? > jan Jonekepa o open e poki supa o kama jo e luka nasa. luka sina li lon insa poki nasa sina. pakalawa! > POKI NASA la; o tawa e PAN SUWI.  sina kama jo e pan suwi li pana supa lape la; ni tan sina isipin e te jan Jonekepa li jo ala e luka to. > jan Jonekepa o kama jo e luka. sina kama jo e LUKA NASA. sina pali MUSI kepeken ni. sina OTELEJOKENA* e ni kepeken LINITO* sina; taso sina sona ala e nimi ni. ijo ante li lon insa poki. > jan Jonekepa o lukin e ijo poki. sina jo e IJO musi e IJO nasa kepeken poki ni. ijo ale li ilo suli tan JAN NASA SULI anu JAN MUSI SONA.  sina li ni ala. kulupu ijo li jo e LUKA NASA TU [li lon linito sina] e LINJA AWEN LUKA MUSI e PALISA UTALA NASA e LEN LAWA PI JAN USAWI e ILO LUKIN MUSI e ILO KON LUKIN ALA MUTE e ILO TELO KONWE MUTE e LIPU MUSI PI JAN UTALA LAWA SASAKA e LIPU TE JAN SONA TO JAN AWIJANTESON. tenpo sona ala la; ijo ni wile pona. tenpo ni la; sina kama jo e ILO KON.

this translation effort did continue, up to page 35. unfortunately I cut it off there, due to being entirely unsure how to translate "hash map", and realising that Dave's whole farce with his modus would require major rewriting (something I wasn't interested in).

[asgoodeasgold]

Hugh has had a brainwave to speed up the Enigma decoding machine (don't ask me to explain 😱) and Alan Turing thinks "this is actually not an entirely terrible idea". I love a good British understatement.

Hugh's face is priceless. And then he goes on stealing Alan's sandwich with a goode smile and I am a goner 💀.

📷 The Imitation Game (2014) my edits