8 ms·

This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this

This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago. Maybe I am just overvaluing www because of the impact it had on people's lives. EDITED: 20th century, not 19th.

noblethrasher 10y ago
I think you meant 20th (or 21st) century.
- madiathomas 10y ago
  Fixed. Thanks.
castis 10y ago
I believe the most useful invention of the 19th century was possibly the cotton gin :)
- sbmassey 10y ago
  Pish-posh, the cotton gin was invented at the end of the 18th century.
  - gunnyguy121 10y ago
    Patented 1794. Checks out
- madiathomas 10y ago
  Fixed. 20th century.
Cyph0n 10y ago
Diffie and Hellman won it only last year, 40 years after their seminal paper was published! It is indeed a very tough award to get.
- madiathomas 10y ago
  Odds of becoming a US dollar billionaire are higher than odds of winning it in your lifetime.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    That's a nice way to put it :P
    - nojvek 10y ago
      How do they choose the winners? Also I guess how CEO's get credit for the doing of a company, TBL gets credit for the Internet?
      - jessaustin 10y ago
        It seems more appropriate to credit TBL for "The Web" than for "The Internet"...
  - hodgesrm 10y ago
    In this case scarcity correlates to value. Given a choice I think I would take the Turing Award. :)
    - madiathomas 10y ago
      Same here. I will rather win that prestigous award.
      - aanm1988 10y ago
        I'd take the money. You can't take either with you and with a billion dollars I could get more than a few things named after me.
        Cyph0n 10y ago
justin66 10y ago
> This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago. Claude Shannon never won it.
- 27182818284 10y ago
  That's an interesting point. I interpret the prize's criteria "for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community" to be less in Claude's space and more in the applied space. Scrolling down through the list of past winners, I've implemented several of the work of winners and am using the WWW right now to communicate this. On the other hand, I think I use Claude's work in the same sense that I use Kirchhoff's laws everyday.
  - justin66 10y ago
    I see a number of theory guys on the list. That's the thing that's interesting about Shannon's exclusion: for any given explanation, there's a counterexample on the list. I've never really known anyone involved very seriously in the ACM, those guys probably know why he was excluded.
  - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
    Stephen Cook, Micali, Goldwasser, Rabin, Scott, Karp, Hartmanis, Stearns, Manuel Blum, Yao and Valiant. These are all pure theoreticians; I didn't include data structures people and applied-ish cryptographers like RSA and DH. More than a significant fraction of Turing awards have been won by theoreticians.
- madiathomas 10y ago
  Let's hope he will be awarded one day, posthumously.
hardtke 10y ago
It's hard to top antibiotics in terms of useful inventions.
- madiathomas 10y ago
  Yes they are very useful. I was only counting computer related contributions since Turin award only recognise people who contributed to computing community.
- LeonB 10y ago
  discovery, not invention. (But I guess developing them into a useful product is itself an invention. Maybe there's no bright line between discovery and invention.)
- hutzlibu 10y ago
  I suppose our world could function without antibiotics, but not without the transistor ...
- nimchimpsky 10y ago
  "the Haber–Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is of importance for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives. The food production for half the world's current population depends on this method for producing nitrogen fertilizers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
timtadh 10y ago
Then again Steve Cook who proved the existence of the class NP-Complete was awarded the Turing Award only 11 years after his paper was published: http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/cook_n991950.cfm http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/cook_n991950.cfm
chubot 10y ago
I always felt that Tim Berners-Lee was not respected enough in both the computer science and programming communities. I felt it especially after working for over a decade at Google, which literally built its entire business on TBL's architectural concepts. For example, Google and other search engines would not work without the principle of least power [1], which a lot of people, including Alan Kay [2], somehow don't understand. That is, if the web language was a VM rather than HTML, there would be no Google. It would also not have been possible for the web to make the jump from desktops to cell phones as the #1 client now. You know the handler in iOS and Android that makes <select> boxes usable? That's an example of the principle of least power. I recommend reading his book "Weaving the Web" [2] if you want to learn more about the story behind the web. I'm very glad that TBL is getting this recognition. He is a genius and also has a very generous personality. People in the programming community seem to talk about Torvalds or Stallman a lot, perhaps because of their loud styles, but I don't see that much about TBL. Ditto in the CS community. "HyperText" used to be a big research area but I guess TBL solved it and people don't talk about it anymore. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power [2] http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442 http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit... [3] https://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny/dp/006251587X https://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny...
- madiathomas 10y ago
  Looks like if you want to be famous, you have to be loud. Maybe that explains why he has been vocal against walled gardens lately. Thanks for the recommendation. Let me check it out. Let me search for it. WWW is very important to my life.
- noblethrasher 10y ago
  I don't want to detract from TBL's accomplishments, especially on this occasion but, he didn't solve the hypertext problem insomuch as he decided that the really hard things like provenance and bidirectional linkages weren't important. Google and Facebook did solve those problems, but only for commercial benefit. Moreover, it's clear that TBL regrets that early decision to the degree that he rails against the walled gardens.
Rexxar 10y ago
Transistors are much more important IMHO.
- madiathomas 10y ago
  Inventors of transistor, led by William Shockley, already won a Nobel prize in Pysics for their invention of transistor. All 3 of them.
hacknat 10y ago
No I think you're spot on. It's easy to see the web as an obvious invention with hindsight, but just imagine a world where tcp/ip is the only protocol available to you. I could easily imagine a world in which someone thought to create an across-the-wire binary specification rather than a really simple text protocol. The genius of http and html is that they are very simple. I remember right after the dot-com bubble crashed a bunch of people basically said the web was dead and that we should be passing binaries back-and-forth. Inventing something simple and useful that the average person can easily pick up is the work of a genius (and yes, the average person can write html, my mom doesn't understand how the internet even works, but she writes html for her job).

noblethrasher 10y ago

I think you meant 20th (or 21st) century.

madiathomas 10y ago
Fixed. Thanks.

castis 10y ago

I believe the most useful invention of the 19th century was possibly the cotton gin :)

sbmassey 10y ago
Pish-posh, the cotton gin was invented at the end of the 18th century.
- gunnyguy121 10y ago
  Patented 1794. Checks out
madiathomas 10y ago
Fixed. 20th century.

Cyph0n 10y ago

Diffie and Hellman won it only last year, 40 years after their seminal paper was published! It is indeed a very tough award to get.

madiathomas 10y ago
Odds of becoming a US dollar billionaire are higher than odds of winning it in your lifetime.
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  That's a nice way to put it :P
  - nojvek 10y ago
    How do they choose the winners? Also I guess how CEO's get credit for the doing of a company, TBL gets credit for the Internet?
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      It seems more appropriate to credit TBL for "The Web" than for "The Internet"...
- hodgesrm 10y ago
  In this case scarcity correlates to value. Given a choice I think I would take the Turing Award. :)
  - madiathomas 10y ago
    Same here. I will rather win that prestigous award.
    - aanm1988 10y ago
      I'd take the money. You can't take either with you and with a billion dollars I could get more than a few things named after me.
      - Cyph0n 10y ago

justin66 10y ago

> This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago. Claude Shannon never won it.

27182818284 10y ago
That's an interesting point. I interpret the prize's criteria "for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community" to be less in Claude's space and more in the applied space. Scrolling down through the list of past winners, I've implemented several of the work of winners and am using the WWW right now to communicate this. On the other hand, I think I use Claude's work in the same sense that I use Kirchhoff's laws everyday.
- justin66 10y ago
  I see a number of theory guys on the list. That's the thing that's interesting about Shannon's exclusion: for any given explanation, there's a counterexample on the list. I've never really known anyone involved very seriously in the ACM, those guys probably know why he was excluded.
- Ar-Curunir 10y ago
  Stephen Cook, Micali, Goldwasser, Rabin, Scott, Karp, Hartmanis, Stearns, Manuel Blum, Yao and Valiant. These are all pure theoreticians; I didn't include data structures people and applied-ish cryptographers like RSA and DH. More than a significant fraction of Turing awards have been won by theoreticians.
madiathomas 10y ago
Let's hope he will be awarded one day, posthumously.

hardtke 10y ago

It's hard to top antibiotics in terms of useful inventions.

madiathomas 10y ago
Yes they are very useful. I was only counting computer related contributions since Turin award only recognise people who contributed to computing community.
LeonB 10y ago
discovery, not invention. (But I guess developing them into a useful product is itself an invention. Maybe there's no bright line between discovery and invention.)
hutzlibu 10y ago
I suppose our world could function without antibiotics, but not without the transistor ...
nimchimpsky 10y ago
"the Haber–Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is of importance for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives. The food production for half the world's current population depends on this method for producing nitrogen fertilizers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber

timtadh 10y ago

Then again Steve Cook who proved the existence of the class NP-Complete was awarded the Turing Award only 11 years after his paper was published: http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/cook_n991950.cfm http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/cook_n991950.cfm

chubot 10y ago

I always felt that Tim Berners-Lee was not respected enough in both the computer science and programming communities. I felt it especially after working for over a decade at Google, which literally built its entire business on TBL's architectural concepts. For example, Google and other search engines would not work without the principle of least power [1], which a lot of people, including Alan Kay [2], somehow don't understand. That is, if the web language was a VM rather than HTML, there would be no Google. It would also not have been possible for the web to make the jump from desktops to cell phones as the #1 client now. You know the handler in iOS and Android that makes <select> boxes usable? That's an example of the principle of least power. I recommend reading his book "Weaving the Web" [2] if you want to learn more about the story behind the web. I'm very glad that TBL is getting this recognition. He is a genius and also has a very generous personality. People in the programming community seem to talk about Torvalds or Stallman a lot, perhaps because of their loud styles, but I don't see that much about TBL. Ditto in the CS community. "HyperText" used to be a big research area but I guess TBL solved it and people don't talk about it anymore. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power [2] http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442 http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit... [3] https://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny/dp/006251587X https://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny...

madiathomas 10y ago
Looks like if you want to be famous, you have to be loud. Maybe that explains why he has been vocal against walled gardens lately. Thanks for the recommendation. Let me check it out. Let me search for it. WWW is very important to my life.
noblethrasher 10y ago
I don't want to detract from TBL's accomplishments, especially on this occasion but, he didn't solve the hypertext problem insomuch as he decided that the really hard things like provenance and bidirectional linkages weren't important. Google and Facebook did solve those problems, but only for commercial benefit. Moreover, it's clear that TBL regrets that early decision to the degree that he rails against the walled gardens.

Rexxar 10y ago

Transistors are much more important IMHO.

madiathomas 10y ago
Inventors of transistor, led by William Shockley, already won a Nobel prize in Pysics for their invention of transistor. All 3 of them.

hacknat 10y ago

No I think you're spot on. It's easy to see the web as an obvious invention with hindsight, but just imagine a world where tcp/ip is the only protocol available to you. I could easily imagine a world in which someone thought to create an across-the-wire binary specification rather than a really simple text protocol. The genius of http and html is that they are very simple. I remember right after the dot-com bubble crashed a bunch of people basically said the web was dead and that we should be passing binaries back-and-forth. Inventing something simple and useful that the average person can easily pick up is the work of a genius (and yes, the average person can write html, my mom doesn't understand how the internet even works, but she writes html for her job).