#Turing Machine

[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

[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.

[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

[ihavemorestuff]

Hear me out, new national holiday idea: Turing day, June 23rd. I find it awesome that one of America's most important gay people has a birthday in pride month. I want to hear about a wave of people performing a Turing test on their local AI language model or something of that ilk on the news for that day. The man saved America and he's only a footnote in most history textbooks.

[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.)

[valepert]

Cathode Ray Dude - Quick Start, Episode 7: Crimes… And Felonies.

CC-BY 4.0

[brigittemarlt]

The man who has broken the code. Alan Turing  is one of Derek’s most memorable portrayal. Emotionally intense. Turing should have been a hero of his time. He was finally a victim of Intolerance. He has contributed to save mankind. And mankind has betrayed him. What Derek did here is more than an artistic performance. It is also a personal tribute to a great man. He has highly contributed by his talent to put Turing’s work and life into light and given him the recognition that he deserved (photo : Martha Swope)

[forgottenbones]

Turing Machines - How Computer Science Was Created By Accident

[geeknik]

The Halting Problem & Quantum Computing

Hey there! So, you've probably heard about quantum computers and how they are these game-changing machines that could potentially solve some of the most complex problems in the blink of an eye. And while that may be true for many problems, there's one problem that even quantum computers can't crack - the infamous halting problem. In this article, we're going to dive into the details of why quantum computers are powerless against this conundrum.

But before we delve into why quantum computers can't solve the halting problem, let's first understand what the halting problem is. In computer science, the halting problem refers to the challenge of determining whether a given computer program will eventually halt (stop running) or loop indefinitely. It was famously proven to be undecidable by the legendary computer scientist Alan Turing back in the 1930s.

Now, let's talk about quantum computers and their unique abilities. Unlike classical computers that use bits to represent information as either a 0 or a 1, quantum computers utilize quantum bits or qubits. These qubits can exist in multiple states simultaneously, thanks to a property called superposition. Additionally, quantum computers harness another property known as entanglement, which allows the state of one qubit to be related to the state of another, no matter the distance between them.

With these extraordinary capabilities, one might think that quantum computers could crack any problem, including the halting problem. However, here's where the limitation lies - the halting problem is fundamentally undecidable, meaning there is no algorithm that can solve it for all possible inputs.

The proof that Turing provided for the halting problem holds true for both classical and quantum computers. It relies on the concept of a "universal Turing machine," which is a theoretical machine capable of simulating any other Turing machine. The proof shows that it is impossible to construct an algorithm that can determine whether an arbitrary program will halt or not.

When it comes to quantum computers, their power lies in their ability to efficiently process certain types of problems, mainly those involving optimization and simulation tasks. They can outperform classical computers in specific domains, such as factorizing large numbers or simulating quantum systems. However, the halting problem is not in the realm of problems well-suited for quantum computing.

The reason why quantum computers fail to tackle the halting problem lies in the undecidability of the problem itself. It transcends the power of both classical and quantum computation. No matter how advanced our technology becomes, we will never be able to develop a general algorithm that can predict the halting behavior of any computer program.

In conclusion, while quantum computers hold immense potential to transform various fields, they are not a magic bullet that can solve all problems, particularly the halting problem. The inherent undecidability of the problem sets a fundamental limitation that no amount of technological advancement can overcome. It's a fascinating reminder of the boundaries that even the most powerful computers face when dealing with the complexities of computation.

So, the next time you hear about the wonders of quantum computing, remember that there are still some puzzles in the computing world that will remain unsolvable, no matter how extraordinary the technology may be.

[ehj3]

MAN UNKIND

 “Man’s being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.” — José Ortega Y Gasset The question was once, “Are we animal or angel?” (or centaur) It was then secularized to ape or automaton. Then Freud answered, “Both!” His Id and Superego being the…

[zelihatrifles]

The Imitation Game

Misunderstood genius is a pretty well-worn trope you may say, but Alan Turing really was exceptional. Benedict Cumberbatch plays him with that precise arrogance of knowing that he is superior to the others, but also with that terrible loneliness that comes from being right all the time, and from a sexual orientation that is so illegal that the government nearly drove him to suicide with the unfair punishment. I should say spoiler alert perhaps, but more than suspense, this information serves to shock us that this pioneer who made modern computers possible was treated with such impunity during his own time. And also, don't stop yourself from feeling miserable about Christopher. So, do go and give it a watch!

[mikethegawd]

back when gay math wasn't just 2 for 1 Espolon shots being basically free (although they obvi ARE)

[getting-out-of-bed-sb]

Engaging my brain for once