alan turing
jdupuis | June 29, 2010Following 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…
jdupuis | June 23, 2010Nice post by Stephen Wolfram on the Wolfram|Alpha blog, Happy Birthday, Alan Turing:
He was in some respects a quintessential British amateur, dipping his intellect into different areas. He achieved a high level of competence in pure mathematics, and used that as his professional base. His contributions in traditional mathematics were certainly perfectly respectable, though not spectacular. But in every area he touched, there was a certain crispness to the ideas he developed--even if their technical implementation was sometimes shrouded in arcane notation and masses of detail.
In some ways he…