Posted on 09/01/2009 6:56:26 AM PDT by OldSpice
Alan Turing, who is said to be the father of modern computer science, was a WWII code-breaker until he was prosecuted by the British government for having homosexual relations. Thousands have now signed a petition calling for a government apology.
Turing committed suicide two years after his prosecution in 1954, but was before given experimental chemical castration as a treatment. He is most well known for his NAZI enigma code breaking work for the British during the second World War and his helping establish a test to measure the intelligence of a machine which is now known as a Turing Test.
So far more than 5500 signatures have been collected on the Downing Street petition started by computer scientist John Graham-Cumming. Author Ian McEwan put his John Hancock on the petition. [BBC]
Talk about watching a culture go down the tubes...and only 60 years out.
Sad.
Precisely.
Now we know that it's all normal and good! Heck, we should all do it!
I never said it did. It uses a form of computer LANGUAGE however.
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Sounds like this guy was the Father of IT Support.
(ducking) ;)
I think Tom and steve want to do it...
Without such algorithmic logic modern computers would not work. I do consider him the founder of modern digital computing. He changed the game. If people want to expand beyond that it’s their call.
LOL
No for 2 reasons: 1) He’s dead. Sorry, but an apology is litterally falling on deaf ears.... and 2) An apology therefore opens up the Government to legal action (being sued) for millions.
Again, look up the definition of computer.
It processes the information on the card. It doesn’t matter HOW it does it, mechanically or otherwise.
Electronics can be seen as mechanical devices as well. They open and close “valves” that stop electron flow.
No. There is no computation. If there is no computation it is not a computer. If it’s not a computer it’s not using a computer language. It also cannot be said to be “processing” in the same way your computer processes. Unless you think your food processor is computing the vegetable dip you put in it.
I have no problem thinking of mechanical computers as computers. But they aren’t modern computers. They aren’t digital. They have no memory as such. There are all sorts of computations they are unable to process.
A computer is a platform for information processing.
Sorry, you can’t get around that definition.
It doesn’t matter if the information is a series of holes on a card, or modern computer programing language.
A computer is simply a device that processes information
Even if you do get an Enigma you can't decipher any message. You need the right wheels with the right positions and settings, and the right ring and plugboard settings, for that message or it's still gibberish. These settings were distributed in codebooks, and getting a codebook would of course only get you the messages for the timeframe covered by the codebook.
Getting the German military Enigma from the Poles gave them a starting point for actually being able to break codes by exploiting weaknesses in the encryption. Turing's contribution wasn't just in the code breaking itself, but in designing computers that could break the codes. His machine with his algorithm could eliminate most of the trillion-trillion possible keys for a message very quickly.
Both the Nazis and the Soviets were notorious for their mistake of persecuting brilliant undesirables, and look where it got them. Luckily for us Britain didn't go after Turing until after the war.
That’s not a modern computer. I’m sorry - I’m not giving credit for modern computers to whatever egyptian poppy addict invented the first astrolabe It meets the same definition you provide but it’s just not a modern computer.
And since what you are insisting can only be called a computer didn’t exist at the time this guy lived, he couldn’t have been the founder of the science that eventually created it, could he.
Not an inventor of resistors, transistors, silicon micro chips, hard drives, or even mechanical memory storage devices, none of it.
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