Following up on my post from a few days ago, a short appreciation of Alan Turing by noted sf author Frederik Pohl:
The close of Pride Month seems an apt time to talk about Alan Turing, inventor of the famed Turing Test for identifying independent intelligence in computers, worked for the British code breakers in World War II, and was one of the leading figures who successfully cracked the secret German messages, a feat which played a considerable part in the victory over Hitler.
Pohl is one of my all-time favourite sf authors and his blog The Way the Future Blogs is an excellent updating of his classic memoir The Way the Future Was.
More like this
In my discussion with Sal Cordova in this post, one point came up which I thought was interesting, and worth taking the time to flesh out as a separate post. It's about the distinction
"The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve." - E. P. Wigner
I haven't taken a look at Uncommon Descent in a while; seeing the same nonsense
get endlessly rehashed, seeing anyone who dares to express disagreement with the
If you've ever read and been confused by computing theory books, you might appreciate the discussion of Turing machines at Good Math, Bad Math.