Alan Turing is “the Key Figure of Our Century,” Marvin Minsky

“A Great science fiction detective story”
- Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine 

Days to Centenary:  146

On the one hand, pointing out yet again how important a role Alan Turing played in twentieth century affairs, and how large his legacy looms into the twenty-first, seems almost unnecessary now that we are in the midst of the Alan Turing Year.

He’s made it, the moment has arrived, the hoopla has begun.

On the other hand, the mere fact that it is the Alan Turing Year means that we run the risk that the celebration itself becomes the focus of our attention and that the man gets obscured in the glitz.

I don’t know how many times I have now seen a news item or a blog post about the fact that there is an Alan Turing postage stamp.  I have nothing against the postage stamp —  he certainly deserves it — but the repetition of this fact at the expense of anything else that might be said about him is a symptom of the fact that Turing may, if we are not careful, end up too much a symbol and too little an actual human being.

I don’t want to detract from any aspect of this year’s celebrations — anyone who has read this page before knows that I appreciate all of Turingdom, the official and the unofficial, whether on a great scale or on a small one, the institutional and the personal.  But at this moment, for the reasons I just gave, I want to come back to the very real man and the real-world accomplishments he realized in his short life.

In The Strange Life and Death of Dr. Turing (1992), the first voice we hear (apart from an announcer briefly quoting Turing himself) is that of Marvin Minsky, who says:

Here’s a person who discovered the most important thing in logic and he invented the concept of the stored program computer and he did these wonderful things in biology and cryptology and started artificial intelligence and ran marathons and rode bicycles and had these terrible sexual problems, but I don’t know anything about this person… here’s the key figure of our century, but I don’t know him and I wish I did.

Marvin Minsky — who is a cognitive scientist working in artificial intelligence — is an intellectual giant.  Just ask Isaac Asimov, who said of him that Minsky was one of only two people whom he, Asimov, would admit was more intelligent than he was (the other was Carl Sagan).  When Minsky says someone is the key figure of the 20th century, that’s coming from someone who is himself one of its key figures.

So Minsky’s comment portrays Turing’s legacy in its appropriate scale, but at the same time it provokes the same reaction in us that Minsky is having himself: we want to know the man, the real guy.

Marvin Minsky

Unfortunately we can’t, not directly, but we can know him indirectly through portrayals and recollections, as in last years Channel 4 documentary, Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker.  Unfortunately that movie isn’t yet available for many of us outside the UK.  Even for those within the UK who’ve seen it, it may have left them wishing for more.

For people in either of those categories, The Strange Life and Death of Dr. Turing is conveniently available on YouTube.  The first half is embedded below. Beneath the embed is a link to the second half.

So by all means, buy one of the limited-edition first day cover stamps with the unique postmark.  I’d love one myself.  But before you do, sit down and watch the documentary and remind yourself just what the celebration’s really all about.

Part two of the film can be found here.

The Computable Artist — On Turing and Michelangelo

“A Great science fiction detective story”
- Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine 

Days to Centenary:  162

Turing and the Art of Classical Computability [12pp., download PDF here] sounds like the name of yet another derivative paper, maybe a survey or a restatement of established mathematical principles.

No, Turing-ites!

Because its author, Robert Irving Soare, who has written several papers in honour of the Alan Turing Year, is using the word “art” in the way you and I would use it when visiting a gallery. He means art as in a skill, but also art as in an aesthetic endeavor.

Soare, who is  the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Chicago, writes:

Mathematics is an art as well as a science. It is an art in the sense of a skill as in Donald Knuth’s series, The Art of Computer Programming, but it is also an art in the sense of an esthetic endeavor with inherent beauty which is recognized by all mathematicians.

In his essay, Soare asks why Turing receives so much credit with respect to the issue of computability when Alonzo Church, as he puts it “got it right and … got it first.”

Soare answers this question by reference to Turing’s mathematical artistry through a side-trip into classical art and a comparison of Donatello, to whom he likens Church, and Michelangelo, whom he compares to Turing.

Michelangelos '"David" (detail)

Soare’s argument is entertaining and enlightening, and will probably be so even for those who don’t end up convinced by his argument, so I recommend reading the paper yourself.  At twelve pages, it’s admirably economical and will more than reward the short time it takes to read it.

Michelangelo's Pietà, completed when he was twenty-four, the same age as Turing when he published his "On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem."

Soare insists — as many commentators have done in relation to scientific disciplines that can be practiced in a theoretical manner, such as mathematics and physics — that math is not simply a matter of getting the right result, but of doing so in a way that is elegant and that may therefore be judged aesthetically:

Mathematicians are not assigned projects like building bridges. Like artists, they choose which problems to work on according to taste and beauty. Like artists, what they produce is evaluated on the basis of beauty as well as mathematical results. The greatest results are those arising from a completely new vision and a profound intuition into the area.

I’m not a mathematician and therefore not in much of a position to judge the relative aesthetics of Turing’s work myself, but if it does constitute great art that bears comparison with Michelangelo I wouldn’t be much surprised.

Great art can be judged by many particulars, but one of its hallmarks is its capacity to be endlessly fecund, and with all of the things that have flowed from  Turing’s brief period of creation his work is certainly that.

An Alan Turing Year That is for Everyone

“A Great science fiction detective story”
- Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine 

Days to Centenary:  170

Believe it or not there are still places on the Earth where there are no internet connections — such places certainly exist in the southern hemisphere, where I live — and over the holidays I was in just such a place, whichI hope explains the absence of new posts on any of my blogs for a little while.

Now that I’m back: Happy Alan Turing Year!

As I counted down to midnight on December 31,  2011 surrounded by family and friends, my thoughts were mostly with the people around me (and others who couldn’t be there), which is as it should be.  But I was certainly aware, as well, that the Turing year was about to begin… was about to begin… and then suddenly had begun.

Happy Alan Turing Year!

For many people this will be a culminating moment.  I imagine it must be such a moment for Andrew Hodges, who many years ago painstakingly pieced together  a myriad of fragments from the life of a man who was too much forgotten and pieced them together into a biography that helped revive him in our collective memory.

It was Hodges’ book that first exposed me to Turing in the 1980s.  I recently bought my fourth — or is it fifth? — copy of Alan Turing: The Enigma, because I can’t resist giving the book away when I meet someone whom I think might enjoy it or benefit from it.  Then, after a time of not having it on my shelf, I’m suddenly afflicted with the need to read it again and have to go out and buy another copy and each time I return to it I learn something new.  For that iterative, cumulative experience, thank you Dr. Hodges, and Happy Alan Turing Year.

And along with him, a very big thank you and Happy Alan Turing Year to the many good people (in part represented here) — most of whom will never have the profile that Dr. Hodges does — who have worked so hard to ensure that the Alan Turing Year happened at all, and who continue to work to ensure that the myriad of events that make up the celebration all over the world actually take place.  You guys are awesome.

And on the topic of people who make the Alan Turing Year happen, having acknowledged all the official folks, let’s not forget the Turing Elves, those unofficial individuals who — through works of art and DIY technical projects and a myriad of other endeavors that are as disparate and entertaining as the Elves themselves — help make every year Alan Turing Year.

And just as it’s a culminating moment for Dr. Hodges, for the official ATY folks, and for the Elves, I can only imagine that it must also be such a moment for Turing’s surviving family members, who only learned many years after the event of Turing’s important role in the war, who finally saw him receive the apology he deserved from the government that persecuted him, and who may now at long last see him pardoned (see this post), which is the most complete vindication that the law can extend to him at this late date.  This is the year the family Turing (whether they bear the name or not) get to finally enjoy the honour that should have been his and theirs a long, long time ago.

It will also be a culminating moment for the members of an LGBT community that is by now so multi-generational, international, and diverse that it can hardly be called one community at all.  It is a constellation of communities that has,  since the beginning of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s, evolved  to have a strength and a public profile that once would have been unthinkable.

Even now it remains a reality for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, the transgendered, and the queer, that each person’s personhood — their character, their intrinsic nature, their contribution to the world, their strengths and flaws, their very self — is too often overshadowed by the simple fact of their sexual orientation.  It’s maddening to be reduced in that way and this recognition of Turing helps to minimize that kind of reduction.  We’re not where we need to be yet, but when a man of Turing’s stature has gone as long as he has with as little recognition as he’s had almost exclusively because of his sexual orientation, international recognition of the kind that the Alan Turing Year provides is certainly a move in the right direction.

And this should also be a culminating  moment for any number of others who are ignored or dehumanized or belittled on account of factors that ought to have no bearing on one’s view of them or on their ability to participate fully in social and professional life, whether that factor is their race, their gender, their religion, a physical or psychological idiosyncrasy or affliction, or anything else which might impair us in our ability to see them as whole and invididual people while it does nothing at all to diminish them.  The diminishment of any one of us diminishes us all and the long overdue recognition of Turing enriches us all.

Which means that — while we must never allow ourselves to be distracted from Turing himself, his work, and the honours that he’s earned — this is nonetheless an Alan Turing Year for everyone.

So, Happy Alan Turing Year to you.

[Note:  The image in this post was borrowed from here.]