Turing Media Feast, Part I: Radiolab Goes Turing

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

Days to Centenary: 85

Just before we move on: The Turing Tenner Prize has yet to be claimed! See the previous post for details.  The deadline is March 31, 2012.

Today’s post is Part I of the Turing Media Feast, a three-day affair (not unlike Woodstock, but without the rain), with parts II and III being posted tomorrow and the day after.

Each installment features audio and video recordings related to Turing that haven’t appeared on this page before.  All of them have been carefully selected to be interesting and to include some element or approach that you probably haven’t come across before.

Today’s post focuses on an episode of Radiolab, a favourite podcast of mine hosted by Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad.

Krulwich is a veteran reporter whom New York Magazine has called “the man who simplifies without being simple.”  Abumrad studied both creative writing and music and in 2011 received a MacArthur Foundation grant, commonly known as a “genius” grant.

In each episode of Radiolab Krulwich, Abumrad, and their team take an idea — usually something with a scientific element to it, but also often with a philosophical, artistic, or other component thrown in — and they illuminate it.

By that I mean both that they metaphorically throw light upon it, thereby revealing its features, and that they illuminate it in the medieval sense: they illustrate it.

Unlike the medieval monks who painstakingly created detailed visual images, though, the folks at Radiolab use a combination of words, creatively employed sounds, and carefully selected music to create an aural portrait of the person or thing or phenomenon they’re profiling.

The Radiolab web site

Recently they created an episode profiling Alan Turing, layering in music with selections of interviews they conducted with three writers:

Theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin, author of the novel A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines;

Novelist and biographer David Leavitt, author of The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer; and 

Science writer James Gleick, author of The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.

At just under 24 minutes, the episode is succinct.  It’s also substantial enough for a Turing-o-Phile while remaining accessible enough for a novice.

I recommend it highly except for its embed code, which either doesn’t work or isn’t compatible with WordPress — otherwise the audio would be embedded right here.

No matter — you can listen to it by clicking on the image above to go to the Radiolab web site and then looking for the March 19, 2012 episode.  Or you can go here in order to find it on iTunes and listen to it on your portable device.

And while the Radiolab Turing episode wouldn’t embed, the guys at the show were kind enough to link to a video of a Turing machine, constructed just as Turing himself described it, and that embedded just fine.  You can find it a little ways down the page.

And below that is a bonus that is not strictly Turing-related, but which you might enjoy nonetheless. This is a video of Robert and Jad joined by the wonderful avant-cellist, Zoë Keating.  They don’t typically make videos, just radio shows, but in this case they’re onstage at Google, doing their thing.

It will give you a more in-depth sense of what they do and may even help turn you into a regular listener, like me.

Don’t miss Part II of the Turing Media Feast tomorrow!

Podcasting Alan Turing, Review 3: Groks Science Show, “Alan Turing”

Days to Centenary: 252

This is the third in a series of reviews of English-language podcasts that relate to Alan Turing (all of which are available for free through iTunes). With any luck I will review them all before the centenary arrives — cross your fingers. (Earlier reviews: Number 1, Number 2)

Source: Groks Science Show

Title: Alan Turing

Running Time: 30:03 (Turing section runs from 10:00 to 26:53)

Format: Audio only

Sound Quality: 5/5 stars

Available here (scroll down to episode 287 from March 29, 2006)

Groks Science Show is a weekly science radio show and podcast hosted by Dr. Charles Lee, Dr. Frank Ling and Dr. Elise Covic. Each episode features an interview with a leading scientist, researcher, or industrialist. Interviewees have included familiar figures like Brian Cox and a variety of other less well known but equally compelling guests. A personal favourite of mine is quantum computation pioneer David Deutsche.

This episode includes an interview with David Leavitt, author of The Man Who Knew Too Much, a biography of Alan Turing (not to be confused with other things entitled The Man Who Knew Too Much, like the collection of G.K. Chesterton mysteries or the movie with Peter Lorre). The interview begins at the 10:00 mark, after other material that was breaking science news when the show aired (2006), but that isn’t any more (although it isn’t without some interest).

Leavitt would be an interesting subject for a better interviewer. In addition to providing a brief summary of Turing’s significance, he emphasizes his book’s examination of Turing’s work through the lens of his sexual orientation. He also provides some examples of the book’s specific contents, for instance saying that (despite not being a mathematician) he attempts to explain Turing’s first important paper “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem” [pdf] by following the specific proof used by Turing, which he describes as being needlessly complex but inherently interesting, rather than by using a more efficient or elegant proof as he says some authors have chosen to do.

The episode concludes with Leavitt submitting to the show’s “Grokatron 5000″ — a segment created perely for fun — in which he is asked to rate various persons as a pass or fail on the Turing Test, which means that for each he must answer the question “would this person be interpreted as human in the course of a Turing Test or might they ever be mistaken for a homo artificialis”? He argues that Michael Jackson passes — could not be mistaken for a machine — because he’s “inimitable,” and George W. Bush passes because “nothing as intelligent as a machine could utter the remarks [he makes].”

I’m sorry to give a thumbs down to Groks — the hosts seem like nice guys and it’s a long-running science radio show, which is an achievement not to be dismissed as trivial. But a review is little help to anyone reading it if it refuses to be critical. If these reviews are to have any justification it must lie primarily in saving people who read them from having to spend hours sorting through everything on iTunes to find a good show related to Turing — I’m supposed to do that for you. So, to paraphrase a position so often taken by my favourite film critic, Mark Kermode: this podcast is not terrible, it just isn’t very good.

The interview is simply not well done. As a source of information, nothing in this podcast matched this single disputatious paragraph from a review of Leavitt’s book in The Independent:

David Leavitt, the American gay novelist, has no mathematical background, though he makes considerable efforts to cover Turing’s work with a condensation of other books. He has not found new sources, nor used the recently released codebreaking documents; his summary of Turing’s Enigma work is particularly thin. His focus lies in applying his interpretation of sexual politics to Turing’s texts.

Now, them’s fightin’ words, but whether one ultimately agrees or disagrees with The Independent’s assessment of Leavitt’s book, it is informative — it assists you in deciding whether it would be worth buying the book, or merely checking it out of the public library, or bypassing it altogether.

Leavitt himself injects some information into his Groks interview, but this ends up being a thin substitute for a well conducted interview. An interviewer who is doing his or her job should do things that the person being interviewed can’t accomplish effectively on their own or are unwilling to do, like challenge them on their interpretation of the facts, point out lacunae in their arguments, or examine their work from a perspective they haven’t thought of before. The Independent does this and Groks doesn’t.

I have briefly sampled other (especially more recent) episodes of this show, and while I have reservations about some of them, they tend to be better than this one, their lack of Turing-ness or Turing-osity notwithstanding.

So my bottom line is threefold:

(1) if you want to know more about Leavitt’s book, look to other sources;

(2) if you want a new science podcast to listen to, try Groks, but listen to an episode other than this one;

(3) if you want to listen to a Turing podcast, try one of the other ones that have been reviewed here, or that are reviewed here in the future.

Until next time.

Podcasting Alan Turing, Review #2: Travels in a Mathematical World’s “History With Noel-Ann Bradshaw”

Days to Centenary: 257

This is the second in a series of reviews of English-language podcasts that relate to Alan Turing  (all of which are available for free through iTunes).

It’s still my intention to review all such podcasts on this site before the centenary arrives, although my research is turning up more and more stuff that is vying for a position here on the blog, so I may have to make an editorial decision somewhere along the way as to what should get priority. For the moment, though, my obsessively completist agenda is solidly in place.

Source: Travels in a Mathematical World

Title: History with Noel-Ann Bradshaw

Running Time: 9:56

Format: Audio only

Sound Quality: 4/5 stars – some sibilant artifacts in the sound

Available here (scroll down to episode 21 for the Turing episode)

Travels in a Mathematical World isn’t a podcast I’d experienced before encountering it in doing research for this blog and I haven’t sampled beyond the Turing episode so I can’t comment on its overall quality.  This episode provides a brief biography of Turing, although in comparison with TechStuff’s podcast this one has a particular emphasis on his work in mathematics rather than on his role in the creation of the computer (which is appropriate since this is a mathematics podcast).

The podcast is hosted and introduced by Peter Rowlett, who has a host of online mathematical ventures, including videos, podcasts, and publications, all available through his web page, including the entertaining “Birthday Presents” video, below.

The bulk of the podcast, however, is delivered by Noel-Ann Bradshaw, a senior lecturer at the University of Greenwich and meetings coordinator of the British Society for the History of Mathematics (who also features prominently in a promotional video for mathematics and statistics at the University of Greenwich, which you can see below — go math geeks!).

The format is that of a straightforward, factual narrative (in contrast, for instance, to the back and forth banter of TechStuff) which is reasonably well written.  The delivery includes a few minor stumbles, but nothing that detracts from the content, and presents the facts in a pleasant manner that makes the content easy to absorb.  The sound quality could be better, but its minor imperfections aren’t very distracting.

Overall, this podcasts works well, but I’m increasingly finding that it, the TechStuff podcast, and some of the others that I have listened to (but not yet reviewed), work best in concert, each one forming a node in an overall array of information.  Some are delivered in a factual manner, others with humour; some are primarily biographical, while others are scholarly.  All together they add up to more than a simple sum of their parts.

Travels in a Mathematical World lives here.  Scroll down to episode 21 for the Turing episode.

Podcasting Alan Turing, Review #1: TechStuff’s “Spotlight On Alan Turing”

Days to Centenary: 263

This is the first in a series of reviews of podcasts available for free through iTunes that relate to Alan Turing. It’s my intention to review all such podcasts on this site before the centenary arrives. At the moment that seems ambitious but reasonable, but it’s likely that there will be new material posted as the centenary approaches -though how much, and how quickly it will appear is anyone’s guess – so we’ll see. If it turns out that there’s so much that I can’t keep up, well, that would be a very agreeable reason to fail.

Source: TechStuff

Title: Spotlight on Alan Turing

Running Time: 36:33

Format: Audio only

Sound Quality: Excellent

Available here.

TechStuff is an enjoyable podcast series from HowStuffWorks.com with topics such as the history of Texas Instruments, Ada Lovelace, space elevators, and digital theft. In one episode designed especially for a NASA geek like me, the hosts review what each member of NASA Mission Control does during a mission (circa the space shuttle).

TechStuff podcast logo

Like all TechStuff shows, the Turing episode is chatty, non-technical, and informal, and is clearly directed at the general listener of reasonable intelligence who has no prior knowledge of the topic at hand. The information in this episode is largely drawn from Andrew Hodges’ book Alan Turing: The Enigma, Hodges’ Alan Turing web site, and the Alan Turing entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

This podcast is a fun, informative general introduction to Alan Turing for anyone who has not yet encountered his life and legacy, which is why I have made it the subject of the first podcast review. It includes a brief overview of Turing’s life, work, and ideas, his involvment in athletics, his wartime work, his sexuality (including his attitude toward it and its ultimate consequences in the context of 1950s Britain), and his death.

The show contains only one error that I noticed, though this is quickly corrected: one host first states that Turing committed suicide by taking cyanide pills, but the other immediately substitutes an accurate account of the cyanide apple that killed him. If anyone listens to the show and notices any other factual issues, write me at nas@homoartificialis.com and I’ll post a note on this site.

I have no hesitation  recommending this show to anyone who wants a pleasant, accurate introduction to the basics of Alan Turing’s life.