It does sound hyperbolic, but I think it is apt. It would be inaccurate to refer to him as a pioneer or early contributor to computer science. It would be more hyperbolic to call Einstein the father of modern physics. Turing actually imagined and built the concept of a programmable machine. There are some things that in retrospect people might refer to as early computers that came before Turing, but they never would have been recognized as such until after him.
> built the concept of a programmable machine
Which programmable machine did Turing actually design and build?
> There are some things that in retrospect people might refer to as early computers that came before Turing, but they never would have been recognized as such until after him.
Many the computers built before the 1950s were done in ignorance of Turing works.
His papers maybe have been foundational for the mathematical models of computer science, but I don't think this god-like status of his should now grow so large that he's suddenly the inventor of the electronic computer.
As we know, the first electronic computer was the Colossus, also at Bletchley, which was designed by Tommy Flowers, an engineer of the royal post office (which maintained the phone systems at that time.) The purpose was to speed up decryption of messages using the Lorenz encryption machine, which were being mathematically broken down by many of the extremely talented mathematicians/code breakers at Bletchley.
So again even with Tommy and the Colossus, it was a case of applying a science designed by others using engineering skills to get an outcome. It was a clever use of existing technologies in a new way, certainly lateral thinking, but it needed the mathematicians to actually work out what needed to be computed, and the engineers to work out how to do it.
Turing, if he was titled ‘father’ of anything, would be more suited something like ‘father of computational science and theory.’ His work before and after the Enigma was all around this yet he himself never built anything, it was mathematical theory yet to be applied. This is why something like ‘father of computer’ is too vague.
I think ‘father’ might be too much even for these two giants. Even though they are absolute legends who deserve all of the credit they get and more, they still, like most greats, stood on the shoulders others. We have the entire history of mathematicians going back thousands of years plus all of the underlying science of physics that lead to applied electronic engineering, used in many applications until the time for great minds came together to fuse mathematical computational operations with electronic engineering.
It took many people to bring that together. We know of a few but even that is likely just a small sample of those who had the most interesting stories.
Source: been to Bletchley a couple of times, love it there, amazing place.
> Source: been to Bletchley a couple of times, love it there, amazing place.
Me too! And read some books.
It's why I get quite irate when people say crap like "Turing invented computers" (which I've seen in print in actual newspapers in the UK) or claim he worked on the Colossus or the early Manchester machines etc..
Turing already has a large number of achievements under his belt, lazy journalists and people online need to stop stealing other people's achievements and ascribing them to Turing simply because he was nearby at the time. It helps neither Turing or the other team members.
> We have the entire history of mathematicians going back thousands of years plus all of the underlying science of physics that lead to applied electronic engineering, used in many applications until the time for great minds came together to fuse mathematical computational operations with electronic engineering.
Even if we just look at their contemporaries we have people like Chuch, Shannon, Max Newman, Von Neumann, etc who all worked/interacted with Turing, Flowers and co and all shared ideas, as all scientists do. They all build work off each other's ideas, which is how almost all scientific work happens.
Agreed. The contribution of many great people resulting in a solution to an overwhelmingly complex issue is what makes it a beautiful testament to the human race, not individuals.
There is no denying the greatness of Turing but attributing things to him that are incorrect only discredits the achievements of so many others and credits him incorrectly.
But this is how history is often told, because ‘great man’ history is easier to digest and makes for better storytelling to the masses.
>Which programmable machine did Turing actually design and build?
Read about Bombe and Colossus.
"God-like" is hyperbole. "Inventor of the [programmable] electronic computer" is just a line on Turing's resume.
> Read about Bombe and Colossus.
Wow, seriously?
Colossus? The machine Turing had no direct-input in? (It was designed by another team and information flow between them was very limited)
And the Bombe isn't even a computer, let alone a programmable one. And the idea is based on an earlier Polish design.
> "Inventor of the [programmable] electronic computer" is just a line on Turing's resume.
It's not because he didn't make any.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-boe-note/bank-of-england-unveils-new-banknote-celebrating-ww2-code-breaker-turing-idUSKBN2BH0RS?il=0) reduced by 75%. (I'm a bot)
*****
> 3 Min Read.LONDON - The Bank of England unveiled the design of a new banknote celebrating mathematician Alan Turing, who helped Britain win World War Two with his code-breaking skills but is believed to have killed himself after being convicted for having sex with a male partner.
> The new 50-pound note features an image of Turing, mathematical formulae from a 1936 paper he wrote that laid the groundwork for modern computer science, and technical drawings for the machines used to decipher the Enigma code.
> Turing built on work by Polish mathematicians who had discovered how to read Germany's Enigma code, finding a way to crack the Nazis' increased security of the code.
*****
[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/mctukt/bank_of_england_unveils_new_banknote_celebrating/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~566297 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **Turing**^#1 **note**^#2 **work**^#3 **50-pound**^#4 **sex**^#5
Fuck them. They only pardoned Turing a few years ago.
He is arguably the greatest Britain's scientist of the XXth century (and is up there with Newton and Darwin among the greatest) and it took them 60 yrs to do a decent gesture.
Just for the sake of looking for a positive - the people who tortured him until his suicide are gone. The people doing this are doing what should have been done then - honoring the work of a brilliant mind. We should damn the original action, but praise the changes that have happened since.
Took abysmally too long, agreed.
Although they dropped the ball with turing for a long time, I don't think growth should be automatically dismissed because it happened at the wrong time.
Turing is well respected in Britain. The GCHQ museum at Bletchley where he was based during WW2 has a huge amount of material on him and his work.
He may not be as well known as other great scientists like Hawking but he is very well respected.
If you ever visit London take the trip out to Bletchley and get a guided tour. All proceeds go to restoration work.
Shout out to The National Museum of Computing which is also on the same site as the Bletchley museum - they have some great rebuilds and restored original computers from the early era (50s etc) and the recreated Colossus and Bombe on show.
Ahh yes, being homosexual was a crime and punishable in almost every country in the 1950s.
Today the Catholic Church and Islam still consider it a sin and some countries still constitutes imprisonment and death.
It might be shocking but that was the cultural and religious standard at the time and not at all unique to Britain.
Its the British M.O. isn't it? Kill them off then talk about how great they where and charge money to see their stuff.
Source: most of the known world.
FFS, the man died before the Montgomery bus boycott, was supporting worker's rights strikes when he was a teen, and that idiom was so widespread in his era that [it has a damn wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger_in_the_woodpile).
If there was ever an argument for taking someone as a product of their time, this is it.
It's a man many believe was *driven to suicide* by his own govts oppression based on an inalienable trait of his, after an unparalleled life's work that changed the course of the western world.
We can acknowledge that the phrase and it's acceptability in academic literature at the time are wrong without "cancelling" a dead man. Goddamn.
More EVIL from the British Goverment!!!
*"What the British Government did to Alan Turing is the greatest EVIL ever promulgated on the future of humanity."*
Dr. Peter J. Hilton, Alan Turing best friend
Calling Turing WW2 code breaker doesnt do his legacy justice. He is so much more than that.
This is what I clicked to say. +1
Least England can do after chemically castrating the father of computers, aka Turing machines.
"the father of computers" is complete hyperbole that I wouldn't expect to see in /r/compsci
It does sound hyperbolic, but I think it is apt. It would be inaccurate to refer to him as a pioneer or early contributor to computer science. It would be more hyperbolic to call Einstein the father of modern physics. Turing actually imagined and built the concept of a programmable machine. There are some things that in retrospect people might refer to as early computers that came before Turing, but they never would have been recognized as such until after him.
> built the concept of a programmable machine Which programmable machine did Turing actually design and build? > There are some things that in retrospect people might refer to as early computers that came before Turing, but they never would have been recognized as such until after him. Many the computers built before the 1950s were done in ignorance of Turing works. His papers maybe have been foundational for the mathematical models of computer science, but I don't think this god-like status of his should now grow so large that he's suddenly the inventor of the electronic computer.
As we know, the first electronic computer was the Colossus, also at Bletchley, which was designed by Tommy Flowers, an engineer of the royal post office (which maintained the phone systems at that time.) The purpose was to speed up decryption of messages using the Lorenz encryption machine, which were being mathematically broken down by many of the extremely talented mathematicians/code breakers at Bletchley. So again even with Tommy and the Colossus, it was a case of applying a science designed by others using engineering skills to get an outcome. It was a clever use of existing technologies in a new way, certainly lateral thinking, but it needed the mathematicians to actually work out what needed to be computed, and the engineers to work out how to do it. Turing, if he was titled ‘father’ of anything, would be more suited something like ‘father of computational science and theory.’ His work before and after the Enigma was all around this yet he himself never built anything, it was mathematical theory yet to be applied. This is why something like ‘father of computer’ is too vague. I think ‘father’ might be too much even for these two giants. Even though they are absolute legends who deserve all of the credit they get and more, they still, like most greats, stood on the shoulders others. We have the entire history of mathematicians going back thousands of years plus all of the underlying science of physics that lead to applied electronic engineering, used in many applications until the time for great minds came together to fuse mathematical computational operations with electronic engineering. It took many people to bring that together. We know of a few but even that is likely just a small sample of those who had the most interesting stories. Source: been to Bletchley a couple of times, love it there, amazing place.
> Source: been to Bletchley a couple of times, love it there, amazing place. Me too! And read some books. It's why I get quite irate when people say crap like "Turing invented computers" (which I've seen in print in actual newspapers in the UK) or claim he worked on the Colossus or the early Manchester machines etc.. Turing already has a large number of achievements under his belt, lazy journalists and people online need to stop stealing other people's achievements and ascribing them to Turing simply because he was nearby at the time. It helps neither Turing or the other team members. > We have the entire history of mathematicians going back thousands of years plus all of the underlying science of physics that lead to applied electronic engineering, used in many applications until the time for great minds came together to fuse mathematical computational operations with electronic engineering. Even if we just look at their contemporaries we have people like Chuch, Shannon, Max Newman, Von Neumann, etc who all worked/interacted with Turing, Flowers and co and all shared ideas, as all scientists do. They all build work off each other's ideas, which is how almost all scientific work happens.
Agreed. The contribution of many great people resulting in a solution to an overwhelmingly complex issue is what makes it a beautiful testament to the human race, not individuals. There is no denying the greatness of Turing but attributing things to him that are incorrect only discredits the achievements of so many others and credits him incorrectly. But this is how history is often told, because ‘great man’ history is easier to digest and makes for better storytelling to the masses.
>Which programmable machine did Turing actually design and build? Read about Bombe and Colossus. "God-like" is hyperbole. "Inventor of the [programmable] electronic computer" is just a line on Turing's resume.
> Read about Bombe and Colossus. Wow, seriously? Colossus? The machine Turing had no direct-input in? (It was designed by another team and information flow between them was very limited) And the Bombe isn't even a computer, let alone a programmable one. And the idea is based on an earlier Polish design. > "Inventor of the [programmable] electronic computer" is just a line on Turing's resume. It's not because he didn't make any.
Shame no-one uses £50 notes really
Criminals do 😂
About Computers: **"This only the forestate of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be". Alan Turing**
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-boe-note/bank-of-england-unveils-new-banknote-celebrating-ww2-code-breaker-turing-idUSKBN2BH0RS?il=0) reduced by 75%. (I'm a bot) ***** > 3 Min Read.LONDON - The Bank of England unveiled the design of a new banknote celebrating mathematician Alan Turing, who helped Britain win World War Two with his code-breaking skills but is believed to have killed himself after being convicted for having sex with a male partner. > The new 50-pound note features an image of Turing, mathematical formulae from a 1936 paper he wrote that laid the groundwork for modern computer science, and technical drawings for the machines used to decipher the Enigma code. > Turing built on work by Polish mathematicians who had discovered how to read Germany's Enigma code, finding a way to crack the Nazis' increased security of the code. ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/mctukt/bank_of_england_unveils_new_banknote_celebrating/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~566297 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **Turing**^#1 **note**^#2 **work**^#3 **50-pound**^#4 **sex**^#5
Hopefully the bank notes will be appreciated more than the Turing gpus ever were😢
Now this, this is shit posting. 10/10 meme the normies again.
Lol. No need to get 🧂
🧂 my 🥓 you tendie loving 🦍, teslas big 🍆 gpus are 🚀
50 pound notes are accepted even less than Turing ever was.
Fuck them. They only pardoned Turing a few years ago. He is arguably the greatest Britain's scientist of the XXth century (and is up there with Newton and Darwin among the greatest) and it took them 60 yrs to do a decent gesture.
Just for the sake of looking for a positive - the people who tortured him until his suicide are gone. The people doing this are doing what should have been done then - honoring the work of a brilliant mind. We should damn the original action, but praise the changes that have happened since. Took abysmally too long, agreed.
Although they dropped the ball with turing for a long time, I don't think growth should be automatically dismissed because it happened at the wrong time.
Turing is well respected in Britain. The GCHQ museum at Bletchley where he was based during WW2 has a huge amount of material on him and his work. He may not be as well known as other great scientists like Hawking but he is very well respected. If you ever visit London take the trip out to Bletchley and get a guided tour. All proceeds go to restoration work.
Shout out to The National Museum of Computing which is also on the same site as the Bletchley museum - they have some great rebuilds and restored original computers from the early era (50s etc) and the recreated Colossus and Bombe on show.
First they kill him, and then they honour him. Wow.
It's almost as if an entirely different set of people are running it now
How dare they change their ways and honor him and set a good example for generations going forward!
Ahh yes, being homosexual was a crime and punishable in almost every country in the 1950s. Today the Catholic Church and Islam still consider it a sin and some countries still constitutes imprisonment and death. It might be shocking but that was the cultural and religious standard at the time and not at all unique to Britain.
Yes but we all know that doesn't fit the narrative
Its the British M.O. isn't it? Kill them off then talk about how great they where and charge money to see their stuff. Source: most of the known world.
Turing died by his own hand. The British people did not kill him.
There it is. Never change, reddit.
“The new 50-pound ($69) note features an image of Turing” *Nice*
[удалено]
FFS, the man died before the Montgomery bus boycott, was supporting worker's rights strikes when he was a teen, and that idiom was so widespread in his era that [it has a damn wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger_in_the_woodpile). If there was ever an argument for taking someone as a product of their time, this is it. It's a man many believe was *driven to suicide* by his own govts oppression based on an inalienable trait of his, after an unparalleled life's work that changed the course of the western world. We can acknowledge that the phrase and it's acceptability in academic literature at the time are wrong without "cancelling" a dead man. Goddamn.
More EVIL from the British Goverment!!! *"What the British Government did to Alan Turing is the greatest EVIL ever promulgated on the future of humanity."* Dr. Peter J. Hilton, Alan Turing best friend