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Ask HN: Who's winning 2030's Turing Award ?
The question is a bit tongue in cheek, but there is a point hidden.
By definition, the Turing Award is meant for long lasting contribution ; meaning the recipients get their prize a long time after their work has been done.
Which means that, "by construction", someone is working today on something that will be a worthy of a prize in the middle of the 2030s.
If not "what people", what topic do you think are candidates ?
- kungito 6y agoEither Svelte or React creators
- angrais 6y agoFor the Turning Award? This is defined by wiki as: "The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions "of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field." Its the Nobel price of computing, so I am not sure that a specific piece of software or its creators would warrant receiving this award. Rather, it's for theoretical contributions to the field, e.g. LeCun et Al., for deep learning.
- tracyhenry 6y agoIt's not true that it needs to be theoretical. e.g. Michael Stonebraker is awarded for making databases practical. But the creator of React might not get the Turing award anyways because they are not in academia.
- cvwright 6y agoIf the popularity of React persists so that it eventually drives a Turing award, I think the award would more likely go to Evan Czaplicki for his thesis on functional reactive programming.
- tracyhenry 6y agoThanks for the reference. I didn't know that there is a paper behind it. However, I'd say it's quite unlikely. First, he had a supervisor Stephen Chong back in Harvard who co-authored the paper. It's unclear who should get the credit on that particular thesis. Second, the paper has unexciting citation count (200+). Lastly, he stopped publishing and is not in academia any more.
- breck 6y agoI think Linus and Junio for git is a no brainer. If they don't get that by 2030 it would be silly. Wolfram also is a no brainer. Deep learning will get at least one more. Chris Lattner and the llvms perhaps? I don't know what work led to the M1 but it feels ground breaking. I'd also like to see perhaps aaronsw and alexandra elbakyan win one. I think my collaborators will win won for 2-D/3-D languages if this prediction comes true: https://longbets.org/793/ https://longbets.org/793/ . Sounds arrogant and probably a mistake in my math but I'm betting on it.
- AlotOfReading 6y agoWhy is wolfram a no-brainer? I get that the guy is intellectually brilliant, but NKS wasn't exactly well received and Mathematica is hardly in the same category as things like Diffie-Hellman, backprop, or optimizing compilers.
- p1esk 6y agoThe ideas explored in Mathematica could well be fundamental to understanding our world. Meaning they could be far more important than "Diffie-Hellman, backprop, or optimizing compilers". Regardless of how much credit Wolfram gets for that.
- AlotOfReading 6y agoCan you explain further? I'm a semi-regular Mathematica user, but it's not at all obvious to me what you're referring to. "Symbolic programming"? The notebook? The massive function library? I genuinely don't get how any of these are supposed to be fundamental to understanding our world.
- lygaret 6y agoI think they meant "ideas explored in A New Kind of Science", Wolfram's book about cellular automata.
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- 27182818284 6y agoJeff Dean would be high on the list, I'd think. I think he has maybe even won the other awards below the Turing already.
- codekansas 6y agoMajor coup if the Turing Award can win a Jeff Dean
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- kevinwang 6y agoI know absolutely nothing about this (not an expert in any of this), but this is a fun question, so here are some ideas I got. topics: maybe some more awards for deep learning (Goodfellow?, DeepMind team for AlphaGo/Zero: Hassabis, David Silver, etc? If the current trend of transformers being hot continues, maybe some authors of "Attention is all you need"? Whoever makes the breakthrough that enables the singularity in the next decade?), a quantum computing cohort could win one year (Shor? Aaronson? idk anything about this field... Umesh Vazirani??). edit: In an alternate universe where blockchain was used only for actually practical purposes instead of the current universe in which its invocation evokes images of cryptocurrency tiktokers, get rich quick schemers, and buzzword-spouters, in an alternate universe where the set of people interested in blockchain was very nearly the same set of people interested in, say, RSA encryption or zero-knowledge proofs, and if pseudonymous people could win (perhaps posthumously?? ok, this is a lot of conditionals...), satoshi would have to win one year, right? Maybe along with their precursors? Dunno if that usually happens with Turing awards.
- truthr 6y agoI am on a tangent here, but I don't think that Transformers will have very long term effects. It is highly resource intensive, and only a few company can take benefit for it. I know HuggingFace has been a gamechanger providing API calls for big models, and providing very practically models like distilBERT, but still, Transformers don't seem practical to me.
- breck 6y agoah, crypto is big one. VitalikButerin perhaps? smart contracts on public block chains will possibly change the way most contracts and transactions happen. of course, none of the crypto folks need the prize money :)
- h8hawk 6y agoPeter shor and Vazirani. I don't get why they are not awarded yet