The End of the Alan Turing Year–And the Beginning of the Bicentennial

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

NOW AVAILABLE for instant download! Click to find out more.

Days since the Centenary: 191

Days to the Bicentennial: 36,333

What an awesome year for Turing fans–which in the computer age is pretty much everyone, whether they know it or not.

Still, at long last the Alan Turing Year is drawing to a close. As of midnight tonight, it will officially all be over. But the Turing-verse has never been constrained by official notions.

I’ve written a number of times about the people I call Turing Elves–people who create works or undertake endeavors that honour, explore, memorialize, or otherwise focus upon Alan Turing and his work without any official sanction, without asking anyone’s permission.

I think Turing Elvery is an especially appropriate way to recall Turing. After all, this was a scientist who–despite having worked at the highest levels of officialdom during the war–began his enquiries on his own, and continued them after the world of officials had condemned and rejected him. And quite apart from his work as a scientist, this was a man who ignored social disapproval with regard to sexual preference, persisting in doing so even after he was convicted criminally for having had gay sex. Doing things for their own sake, and doing them whether or not others approved, was a key theme in his life. It might be too  recursive to call Turing the first Turing Elf, but he certainly set the ball rolling.

And long before the Alan Turing Year was a sparkle in anyone’s eye, Andrew Hodges  began work on his biography of Turing, Alan Turing: The Enigma. It has recently been issued in an excellent new centennial edition and is now not only a  classic work within the Turing-verse but also in the world of scientific biography generally. Throughout the Alan Turing Year, Hodges has been a key member of the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee–in other words, an official of sorts–but back then he was a Turing Elf. Maybe he was the first.

Not long after Hodges finished his biography, science fiction author Greg Bear wrote “Tangents,” a short story featuring a protagonist clearly based on Turing that was  first published in Omni magazine in January 1986. It went on to win the Hugo and Nebula awards and to be anthologized several times and it set the precedent for a whole lineage of fictional incarnations of Alan Turing. Bear, too, was a Turing Elf and remains enthusiastic about Turing Elvery in general.

The trend has continued, not only in written works, but in sculpture, street art and graffiti, painting, music, drama (on stage, film, and television), and in many other forms. (I’m still waiting for the Turing opera–apparently there’s one on the way.)

And the Turing Elvery will continue, I suspect even more energetically than before the centenary took place.

As part of it, this page will continue. In theory it’s now counting down the days to the bicentennial–just as it counted down the days until the centenary began. Who knows if web pages, as such, will even exist in 2112, but the countdown signals the intention to keep this page going and the spirit of the Turing celebrations alive even after 2012 has ended.

And I will be continuing with other forms of Elvery. I am at work on Conjuring Turing: The Fictional Afterlife of Alan Turing, a book for the general reader about the sub-genre of fiction that started with Greg Bear’s story “Tangents” and now includes a wide variety of authors working in several different literary traditions.

The book will include, where possible, interviews with the authors of the works under discussion. So far I’ve found the authors I’ve contacted to be very enthusiastic, even Greg Bear, whose story first appeared almost 30 years ago.

Here’s an update:

• I’ve already interviewed Rudy Rucker about his novel, published earlier this year, Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel. Turing & Burroughs is a potent surrealistic roller coaster ride that not only celebrates Turing, but also features Rucker’s note-perfect literary impersonation of Beat author William Burroughs. You can read the interview here.
• I’m in the process of interviewing Christos Papadimitriou, the author of Turing (A Novel About Computation).
• Recently Greg Bear himself has agreed to be part of the project, and that interview is underway. You can find the story “Tangents” in his short story collection of the same name.
• Paul Morris, the author of the children’s book Time Traveller Danny and the Codebreaker (part of the Time Traveller Kids series) has also signed on. He very kindly sent me a copy of his book, which I thoroughly enjoyed and which I recommend for any kid who enjoys a great time travel yarn (as well as for any adult who likes a good story, especially anyone with a passing interest in our boy Alan).

So, for anyone who’s sad to see the Alan Turing Year go, take heart! The official year was great, but it was the icing on the cake–the official expression of an enterprise that started a long time ago and won’t be stopping any time soon.

And stay tuned to this page–it’s not going anywhere.

Illuminating Alan Turing With The Caustic Effect

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

NOW AVAILABLE for instant download! Click to find out more.

Days since the Centenary: 144

Days to the Bicentennial: 36,380

The Turing Elves are at it again.

(Really? It’s almost the end of the Alan Turing Year and you haven’t encountered the term “Turing Elf” before? See the tab at the top or just click here.)

What have this band of Merry Mathematiphile Pranksters done today? Well, some folks over at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have been experimenting with the caustic effect, which Science Codex explains thusly:

This “caustic” effect is well known and easy to observe; a bit of sunlight shining on a pool of water produces patterns that dance on the surrounding tiles or walls. These undulating lines, apparently random, are generated by light that hits the moving surface of a pool or puddle. This effect, which is very mobile and dynamic in liquid, produces static patterns with solid transparent materials such as glass or transparent acrylic (better known as Plexiglass).

Their idea was to create a program that would allow them to shape a piece of glass or plexiglass or other material into a structure that would bend and focus light so that it would produce an image.

There’s nothing embedded in the material, and no image is imprinted upon it. Instead it is molded into a shape that will produce the desired effect when held in the correct relation to a light source and a target surface. That sounds all complex, and in fact it’s difficult to do, but once you see it, it’s easy to understand the theory.

Here’s an image of the caustic effect at work–and this is where the Elves make their appearance. Note whose portrait the folks at the Ecole chose to create.

The caustic effect, put to Turing Elf use.

If you want a more lucid explanation than I’ve given (and in a cool accent to boot), check out the video below.

I told you. Those fricken’ elves just never sleep.

[To find out more, see report from the Ecole here.]

Alan Turing, Muse to Musicians

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

NOW AVAILABLE for instant download! Click to find out more.

Days since the Centenary: 20
Days to the Bicentennial: 36,504

Alan Turing has has turned up in many unexpected places in the course of my research and writing for this page, but perhaps nowhere as unexpected as FAWM.

What the heck is FAWM?

Well, it’s an acronym for February Album Writing Month, a NaNoWriMo-style event in which participants attempt to write 14 songs in the 28 days of February (or 14 1/2 songs during leap years).

And what on earth does Alan Turing have to do with a weird, intense, songwriting event?

Alan Turing renders “Molly Malone” on the violin [artist's impression].

Back in 2004, a guy named Burr Settles launched the first FAWM. As part of the event he participated in a “tribute challenge” in which songwriters had to pen a tune as an ode to someone famous. Settles chose Alan Turing.

Since then, other songs have turned up in FAWM that are about, or at least mention, Turing.  Like this one entitled Meles Meles or this one called I Heart Alan Turing.

Apparently Settles’ original Turing tune didn’t quite rise to the lofty goal set for it and “Alan Turing” thereafter took on a specific slang meaning within the FAWM community. There’s even an entry for it in the FAWM glossary:

alan turing (n.) song for which you think your vision might be greater than your songwriting ability.

But the Turing tunes don’t stop with FAWM.  Youtube currently sports two songs for Turing, one titled Song for Alan Turing and one titled A Song for Alan Turing, both embedded below.

Finally, the Molly Malone reference in the caption to the illustration (not to mention the illustration itself) comes from an announcement that experimental electronic duo Matmos were giving away downloads of that song back in March of this year. The song is featured on their EP entitled — what else? — For Alan Turing.  The announcement reads:

Many people are aware that 2012 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, “The Man Who Cracked The Enigma Code”, much of whose work remained secret until after his untimely death in 1952. Less well known is that his Mother was Irish, and his favorite song was Molly Malone, which, so the story goes, he insisted on rendering on the violin to the police who came to arrest him on charges of gross indecency, before agreeing to make his statement to them.

The recording by Matmos of Clodagh Simonds (Fovea Hex / Mellow Candle) singing Molly Malone, was first featured on their FOR ALAN TURING ep, part of a work commissioned in 2006 by The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkely CA on the opening of their new Mathematics Hall. It will be available as a free download for three days only, March 16, 17, and 18, from the Fovea Hex Bandcamp page foveahex.bandcamp.com . Matmos anticipate that the full FOR ALAN TURING ep will be digitally re-released to coincide with Turing’s 100th anniversary in June 2012

That song, too, is embedded at the bottom of the page.

Of course this is not the first we’ve heard of Alan Turing finding musical expression.  Last November in a post called The Turing Elves Put On Radiohead Masks we encountered a song called No Deciding by a mysterious band called the Klein 3 Group, which apparently appeared on their “hit” album OK Computer Science (an album I’ve yet to find anywhere).

And who can forget Epic Rap Battles of Advanced Mathematics, Alan Turing vs. Kurt Gödel? A classic entry in both the music and comedy catgegories.

Still, I would never have guessed that the Turing Elves would have been so busy in the musical corner of the arts.

Molly Malone from For Alan Turing

A Song for Alan Turing

Song for Alan Turing

Alan Turing & The Suicide Question

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

NOW AVAILABLE for instant download! Click to find out more.

Days since the Centenary: 15
Days to the Bicentennial: 36,509

The official verdict regarding Alan Turing’s death ruled it a suicide.  Now there is specualtion that Turing’s death may have been accidental rather than intentional.

The man behind the questions is Jack Copeland, a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.  He is (among other things) the author of several books on Turing and the Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing.

Professor Jack Copeland

Professor Copeland has revisited the official determination and found it wanting.  As the BBC reports:

He believes the evidence would not today be accepted as sufficient to establish a suicide verdict.

Indeed, he argues, Turing’s death may equally probably have been an accident.

What is well known and accepted is that Alan Turing died of cyanide poisoning.

His housekeeper famously found the 41-year-old mathematician dead in his bed, with a half-eaten apple on his bedside table.

It is widely said that Turing had been haunted by the story of the poisoned apple in the fairy tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and had resorted to the same desperate measure to end the persecution he was suffering as a result of his homosexuality.

But according to Prof Copeland, it was Turing’s habit to take an apple at bedtime, and that it was quite usual for him not to finish it; the half-eaten remains found near his body cannot be seen as an indication of a deliberate act.

Indeed, the police never tested the apple for the presence of cyanide.

Moreover, Prof Copeland emphasises, a coroner these days would demand evidence of pre-meditation before announcing a verdict of suicide, yet nothing in the accounts of Turing’s last days suggest he was in anything but a cheerful mood.

As comforting as it might be to imagine that Turing died accidentally rather than by his own hand, there are strong arguments against the conclusion.  The creators of the film Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker, which portrays Turing in psychoanalysis near the end of this life, have posted a respectful but adamant point-by-point refutation of Copeland’s position.

The Codebreaker web site

You can find the entire argument at the link above (or click on the image of the web site), but I will list the first two points to give you a sense of their position.

1. Alan Turing’s brother John has written an account of his brother Alan in which he describes reading the dream books that Alan Turing had written at the suggestion of Dr. Franz Greenbaum, a Jungian analyst whom Alan visited during the last 18 months of his life.  After Alan’s death, John Turing was urged to read these dream books by Dr. Greenbaum because at the time John was inclined to believe the death was an accident.  Greenbaum felt that there was enough evidence in the dream books to suggest that Alan was deeply unhappy and that suicide was a likely scenario. After reading the dream books John Turing changed his mind: Alan, in his mind, had committed suicide.  The dream books have since been destroyed, but John Turing’s son Dermot is convinced that his father was right and that his uncle Alan committed suicide.  In turn, Dr. Greenbaum’s surviving daughters remember their father being devastated at Alan’s death, devastated because as his therapist he had an insight into Alan’s death as suicide rather than accident.

2.  Professor Copeland says the coroner should not have ruled the death a suicide in part because there was no evidence of pre-meditation.  The historical record tells a different story.  First, Turing prepared a last will and testament on February 11, 1954, less than four months before his death.  Turing biographer Andrew Hodges, in his book “Alan Turing: The Enigma,” notes that Turing mentioned suicide as far back as 1937.  Additionally, Turing’s close friend and the executor of his will, Nick Furbank wrote to Turing’s friend Robin Gandy soon after the death.  Furbank mentioned that Turing had previously spoken of suicide to him and Turing had put some of his papers in order before his death.  Furbank wrote, “The way he talked about suicide before, and his general way of doing things (plus the fact that he had arranged his letters in labeled packets) still makes me think he could not have done it just on impulse.”

Believers of the accident theory point to unsent mail and an appointment for the day after his death as evidence of an accident.  Experts on suicide have told us that often the actual decision is made on an impulse.  With Turing, it seems he had thought about it for some time, but may have made the actual decision to carry it out in the spur of the moment.  Experts told us how the families of suicide victims often protest that the death would have made sense a few months or years before the fatal act.  Or that their loved one was not acting depressed.  In fact, they say there may have been a recent improvement in their condition.  The fact that some people who saw Turing in the days before his death were confused by his apparent suicide is not unusual when compared with other cases of suicide.  We will never know the exact reasons why he did it because suicide is often an inexplicable act.

Who’s right?

I think Professor Copeland’s examination of the question is worthwhile, but I strongly suspect that Turing did, in fact, die of suicide and that the evidence in favour of this conclusion is stronger than that which purportedly indicates accident.

More importantly, I’m not sure how much it matters.  As I said, it’s tempting to seek comfort in the idea of an accident, but is there really comfort to be found there?

At one time it might have spared his family shame if his death had been an accident rather than a suicide, and this must have been a consideration at the time when both his sexuality and the manner of his death must have made matters doubly painful for his family and friends, but I doubt that’s much of a consideration today.

It’s tempting to hope that Turing didn’t suffer so much distress over his arrest, conviction, and chemical treatment (see the About Alan Turing page for details) that he took his own life, but his suffering on these counts was no less real even if his death was accidental.

And his actual death can hardly have been any less terrible to experience if he suddenly found himself suffering painfully from acute cyanide poisoning and realized that his failure to take proper precautions had doomed him, rather than intentionally poisoning himself and lying down to await death.

If someone were proposing that Turing had been assassinated, that might make a meaningful difference in our understanding of him and of the significance of his death, but I’m not sure that proposing an accidental death has the same effect.

(To my knowledge no one has suggested assassination apart from in an entirely fictional setting.  Computer scientis, science fiction writer, and high level Turing Elf Rudy Rucker raised the possibility in his surreal story The Imitation Game, which imagines a failed assasination attempt by the British government, foiled by Turing, who then fakes his own death and escapes to Tangier. I highly recommend The Imitation Game, by the way, which will ultimately form part of Rucker’s upcoming novel, The Turing Chronicles.  You can hear Rucker read the story here.)

Still, I’m open to persuasion.  If you’ve reached a different conclusion, feel free to post a comment or to email me at nas@nassauhedron.com.

A trailer for Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker can be found below.

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.]

The Turing Elves Put On Radiohead Masks

Days to Centenary: 214

Turing Elves — to whom I have referred several times on this blog — are those often invisible but near-ubiquitous souls who have no official standing vis a vis Alan Turing, but who nonetheless mount performances, create objects d’art, and otherwise do deeds that honour, commemorate, or even parody the man, his work, and his legacy.  (“Elves” because, like Santa’s Elves, they work unseen offstage and then suddenly brighten everyone’s day by delivering their gifts to the world.)

My hat is off to the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee and all the other official Turing Year folks, who are doing an amazing job — I don’t want to detract in any way from what they’re doing, just to add to it.

The Turing Elves are the DIYers, guerilla theatre artists, and flash mob ghosts of the Turing legacy.  Out of sheer geek love, with a rampant sense of fun and often without even attribution, they enhance the world, each in their own, individual way.

They are people like:

• Posterchild, who decorated Toronto, Canada with the Turingator
• Rupert Rawnsley of Cardiff, UK, who revived the ancient art of the lithophane through a steampunk-ish combination of artisnal craft and 3D printing, and
• The various folks (listed in the credits)  who wrote and performed the awesome Turiung/Gödel rap battle

Heck, the original Turing Elf has to have been Andrew Hodges, who is now a member of the Advisory Committe, but long before the Alan Turing Year was dreamt of he published Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983). His book  contributed critically to Turing’s rise from relative obscurity among the general public to something rather better than obscurity today — something bordering on fame, at least as far as awesome mathematicians experience it — and I have to imagine that it was a lonely thing indeed to have been a Turing Elf in those days.

All of which brings us to today’s Elves, the Klein 3 Group, a musical group who recorded a Turing Tune called No Deciding.

They are a band shrouded in mystery — or at least there appears to be little information about them on the net.  The artifact I want to draw to your attention is the YouTube video of No Deciding, which is embedded below, but beyond that there are few clues to their identity, whereabouts, or other output, despite repeated references to their “hit” album OK Computer Science, a riff on the Radiohead album OK Computer.

They have a sound file of No Deciding on SoundCloud, and the page there indicates that they’re from “Richmond, United States,” but doesn’t tell us if that’s the one in Virginia, the one in California, the one in Kentucky, or some other Richmond altogether. The lyrics to No Deciding are included in an academic handout that includes the bandmembers’ names (Sam Cole, Joe Kramer Miller, and David Leibovic), but I have no way of knowing if the list is correct.  (The handout is from a theory of compution course at Oberlin College).  If anyone finds anything more substatial about them, by all means let me know at nas@homoartificialis.com.

Be that as it may, I like the song and maybe you will too, so here it is.  You can find the lyrics below the video.  (I think the lyrics bear some resemblance to the lyrics of The Odds, who are great, though the music is entirely different.)

.

No Deciding

A tape that’s

full up with blank symbols

a 9-tuple that defines you

who knows if you’ll halt?

Q a set of states

and Gamma a set of symbols

Sigma, a subset of Gamma

The tape head

just moves left or right

delta brings us

back and forth with no deciding 3x

halting, problem,

this is my final state

my final configuration

back and forth with no deciding 3x

such a pretty proof of

such a pretty theorem

back and forth with no deciding 3x

Turing in Fiction — Greg Egan’s “Oracle”

Days to Centenary: 219

There is a small but not insignificant body of fiction which features Alan Turing as a character.  With great good luck it turns out that some very good examples of the oevre are available free online.

Greg Egan is a Hugo Award-winning Turing Elf, an Australian science fiction writer whom I have been aware of for a long time, but never quite got around to reading until now, which immediately made me realize that I should have been reading him for years.

The occasion for me to finally get around to sampling his work is a story of his from 2000 entitled Oracle that does several things at once.

First, it asks the question that is so often asked around the imaginary living room that this blog would have if it were in meatspace rather than cyberspace: what if Alan Turing had lived?

Second, it also — rather ambitiously, and I would say successfully — asks the question: how can one write a story based on the previous question  and make the manner in which he survived a real feature of the story rather than just a cheap device?

Finally, it asks the question: what would happen if you put Alan Turing and C.S. Lewis in a cage match battle over the reality or otherwise of the existence of the Christian God.

C.S. Lewis

Now, not having read anything else that Egan has written (an oversight I intend to remedy as soon as possible), I can’t say whether he’s an extremely fine writer who can regularly pose difficult challenges for himself and then handle them with aplomb or if the day he wrote this was just a really, really good day.  I suspect it’s the former — I even have at least a little bit of C.S. Lewis-like faith that it is — but the Turing in me points out that as yet I have no evidence either way.

However that may be, this story rocks.  Egan’s reputation is as a writer of hard science fiction, and his use of science in the story — to my amateur’s eye, anyway — is persuasive enough to at least not interfere with the suspension of disbelief despite some unprecedented events.  He imbues both of the main characters with a genuine breath of life.  He captures and holds your attention from start to finish (or at least he did mine).  And he allows his characters to do real battle over an important question without making either one of them a dumbass straw man.

If you want to find out more about the story, see some reader reactions, and  browse some “if you liked that then you’ll probably also like this” recommendations, check out its entry on the excellent Mathematical Fiction.

But before you do that, read the story.  As Alex said in that charming/creepy voice of his in Clockwork Orange ”You – are – invited!”  Greg Egan’s Oracle.

[The image of Lewis is by Sigurdur Jonsson and can be found here]

Touring Turing — Awesome Artists for a Genial Genius

Do not miss this: the official Alan Turing Year 2012 is on IndieGoGo.com to raise funds for a Turing-centric art exhibition that will be staged at a number of different venues.  This will be a travelling exhibit entitled  ”Intuition and Ingenuity,” which will include workshops, talks and other events.  As the title says, Turing’s touring.

There are some truly awesome artists already confirmed, including: Roman Verostko, Boredom Research, Patrick Tresset, Greg Garvey, Anna Dumitriu and Alex May.  Click on the artists’ links — you will not be underwhelmed.

So do the right thing and lend a hand! Donate a dollar, or a Euro, or some latinum if that’s what’s in your pocket! The Turing-elves command you! And an apparition which just might be the ghost of Alan Turing lurks in the background, in case you don’t. Forget the Ghost of Christmas Past — you do not wanted to be haunted by a mathematician. Click here to avoid the ire of the Turing-verse.

Now as a reward you get to watch one of Patrick Tresset’s robots in action. Enjoy.

The Gentleman Vandal and the Turingator

Days to the Centenary: 239

Posterchild is the nom de guerre (or maybe nom d’art) of a Toronto street artist, a self-styled “gentleman vandal” who creates independent public art.  Sometimes his work is in a familiar style, like stencilling.  Other times his projects are participatory, as with Take a Picture, Leave a Picture, in which he mounted cameras in public places for anyone to use, then later replaced the cameras with framed prints of the photos people had taken. He maintains a blog on which he has documented his work for years, using text, still images, and video.

In 2006, Posterchild meditated upon the question “What if Alan Mathison Turing — the man often considered to be the father of modern computer science — was actually a highly specialized T-800 model, sent back in time to ensure the eventual creation of Skynet?”  The result of his musings was the Turingator, pictured below.

The Turingator, Toronto, September 2006

Posterchild then revisited the Turingator in February 2007, after it had been up for a few months.

The Turingator, Toronto, February 2007

Naturally the street had had it’s way with it. As the artist says:

The paper has gotten nice and yellowed, and has been torn at a great deal. But the key parts are left. It looks great. I think it has aged very well.

Then, in 2009, Posterchild recycled the Turingator as a sticker to celebrate the British government’s official apology to Turing for his prosecution for having engaged in gay sex and his subsequent chemical castration, both of which are widely thought to have contributed to his suicide.  Posterchild put up over 100 of the stickers.

Turingator sticker, New York, October 2009

Now, I would never encourage anyone to break the law, but neither would I want to exclude street artists from being Turing Elves and creating their own works for the Turing Year, so to the extent that there are already people going out and posting images or graffiti or other forms of independent public art, there are worse things they could do than to honour Alan Turing.  I’m just sayin’.

Here is a link to a video of Posterchild at work, in this case on one of his astronauts (they are a theme with him: sometimes doomed, sometimes dead, often faceless, and for his first gallery show, embodied in fabric dolls) .  Caution: the video opens with some rather loud construction noise, though it then quietens down and settles into some nice music.

Turing’s Legacy – Art: Turing Elves Go All “Maker Faire” On An Ancient Art

Days to Centenary: 243

Today’s installment of Turing’s artistic legacy has a distinctly DIY, make-ist [Make magazine | NYC Maker Faire] spirit. Rupert Rawnsley of Cardiff, UK has made a lithophane of his hero (and ours) Alan Turing.

He did this with the upcoming Alan Turing Year specifically in mind, which just goes to show that no matter how many interesting official events the ATY will include, there are bound to be many equally interesting unofficial events and projects, created by Turing-elves like Rawnsley for their own enjoyment and that of other Turing-o-philes, tucked away in the corners of the world and just waiting to be found. If you have an unofficial event or project planned (or perhaps already executed), write me at nas@homoartificialis.com. Responses will be posted (unless you request otherwise).

Now, back to Rawnsley and his lithophane. “What the heck is a lithophane?” I hear you ask.

Put simply, it’s a transluscent 3D image that can only be seen properly when backlit. European lithophanes originated in the 1820s, although they may have existed much earlier in Asia (possibly as long ago as the Tang Dynasty in China, 618CE–907CE).

Here’s a vintage European lithophane in a specially constructed stand:

1820s Lithophane (Birmingham Museum of Art)

And how does one make a lithophane? Well, I have two answers. The first goes like this:

Lithophane, 19th Century Edition

Carve an image into warm wax, transfer it to gypsum (and sometimes then to metal if you want to make multiple lithophanes from a single mold). Then use this as a mold to cast a final version in porcelain. The resulting image will be somewhere in the range of 1.5-6mm thick.

The second answer, which uses the technology Turing helped create to update the procedure and shift much of the work to technology, looks like this:

Lithophane, 21st Century Edition

Take a black and white image and use a computer program (Bitmap zu IGES/STL Konverter) to translate it into a 3D relief image (this takes mere seconds), render the results in G-code (several hours), and then print on a 3D printer (several more hours). Rawnsley has helpufully uploaded his code for anyone who might be able to use it, along with images and technical information about the process he used.

The final product of the modern approach looks like this:

Turing lithophane hanging in a window

The sequence leading up to the result looks something like this:

Rawnsley’s project page is here.

Lithophane miscellany

Now that you’re part of the very exclusive lithophany clique, you may want to visit the Blair Museumof Lithophanes, have a look around an international selection of lithophanes at the bottom of this page, examine an alternative description of how to make your own lithophanes, or purchase a rare, never marketed, Elvis lithphone (oops, sold for US$350.00… there must be another one out there somewhere).

Until next time!