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We've been over this. Gödel's mu-recursive functions were a poor model of computation because it's completely unclear how to physically implement the arbitrary-

by bo1024 5y ago

We've been over this. Gödel's mu-recursive functions were a poor model of computation because it's completely unclear how to physically implement the arbitrary-function minimization operator. So people didn't see how to build a machine that calculates this way. Similarly, there's no clear way how to mechanize lambda calculus. Turing Machines, on the other hand, were instantly obviously mechanizable. It was clear that one could build a physical machine to run any Turing program without human input. By proving that they could simulate the other systems, Turing showed that those other systems could be mechanizable as well. I don't understand why Schmidhuber continues to ignore this crucial point.

KingOfCoders 5y ago
"For example, it was claimed that Turing founded computer science.[...] Turing's 1936 paper provided the "theoretical backbone" for all computers to come." So your argument is, because it is unclear how to "physically implement the arbitrary-function minimization operator", Turing is the better "theoretical backbone" and has founded computer science?
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  Not OP, but I agree with them. The word computer means multiple things. In one sense it the abstraction of universal computation. Imagine a world where actual physical computers didn't progress to universal computation, but were stuck being purpose built to the present day. The field of computer science would be utterly different because they couldn't actually compute anything with their science. They could just discuss computability in an abstract sense. It'd be like physics without the particle colliders or telescopes or lasers. I think of the founders of computer science more like the founding fathers of America, rather than a single guy named Turing, but some are more memorable than others.
  - KingOfCoders 5y ago
    The article writes about your point of general computation and purpose built computers: "Likewise, Konrad Zuse never got a Turing award despite having created the world's first working programmable general computer 1935-41. [...] It was pointed out that none of the computers built during the 1940s were influenced in any way by Turing's 1936 theoretical paper, [...]"
  - mr_toad 5y ago
    > Imagine a world where actual physical computers didn't progress to universal computation, but were stuck being purpose built It’s not clear that you need a theory of computation to build a stored process computer. You might not clearly understand the theoretical capability of such a machine , but that wouldn’t prevent you from doing many useful things with it.
- bo1024 5y ago
  I don't think it's important to quibble over who's overrated or underrated among these giants of math and CS who already get tons of recognition (I'm glad Schmidhuber brings many other historical names into the narrative). However, yes, I do think that 'mechanization' or physical implementation is a crucial piece of Turing's contribution that is wrongly ignored in this article. And I think without mechanization, there is no CS as we understand it.
  - KingOfCoders 5y ago
    I can only repeat my comment from down: "Likewise, Konrad Zuse never got a Turing award despite having created the world's first working programmable general computer 1935-41. [...] It was pointed out that none of the computers built during the 1940s were influenced in any way by Turing's 1936 theoretical paper, [...]"
    - obastani 5y ago
      As far as I know, Konrad Zuse didn't prove that this strategy was a universal model of computation. In contrast, Turing proved that his universal machine could emulate any other machine, given the right program. In my view, Turing's contribution is providing a plausible definition of computation along with a deep and comprehensive theoretical characterization of the properties of this model of computation. This is why Turing machines form the basis of theoretical computer science, and not other models such as lambda calculus. I think saying that Turing machines were adopted since they were merely more convenient is highly misleading. I think this pattern repeats a lot: There are many cases where you can point to multiple people who invented similar ideas around the same time, but it is typically the person who provided the most deep and comprehensive treatment of the subject that ultimately gets most of the credit. This depth is not conveyed in pop science attributions such as "Turing invented computation", but this doesn't mean Turing doesn't deserve the credit.
    - mcguire 5y ago
      I don't believe anyone has received a Turing award for creating a working computer.
- w-j-w 5y ago
  I think that proving computers could exist in physical reality satisfies this claim very well
- jimhefferon 5y ago
  The question in the air in 36-ish was something like, "OK, clearly we can mechanically compute things like the sum of two numbers or the prime factorization of a number. But are there other things that can be computed with a discrete and deterministic mechanism?" (At the time they called these "effective" functions.) Church had piles of stuff that he and his students produced that were computable with the lambda calculus. Basically, all of the natural number functions that a person thinks are intuitively mechanically computable, those folks had showed how to lambda compute. With this evidence, he proposed to Godel (they were working together at Princeton at the time), who was considered the world's expert, taking "lambda-calculable" as a mathematically precise version of "mechanically computable." But Godel was notoriously careful, and he did not accept the thought as perfectly clear. That is, they had a subset of the things that could be mechanically computed. But was it the entire set? Or was there something that some discrete and deterministic mechanism could be made to do that would lead to more than Church's set? Imagine you are Dedekind and you are looking at the primitive recursive functions and (1) any such function is intuitively mechanically computable, and (2) you are able to work out how to define a pile of things like prime factorization of an integer using this system. You might well conjucture that this is it. But we know (and Godel and Church and Turing knew) that this is not it, that you need to add unbounded search of some kind (this is what minimization does) to get more things that are intuitively mechanically computable. I agree that the minimization operator is not as easy to picture with gears and levers as some of the other operations. But the issue in 36 was that a person could worry that there was even more. Just as minimization is not as easy to picture and the need for it didn't hit Dedekind with great force, could there be something else out there that we have all missed? That worry disappeared when Godel read Turing's masterful analysis. It convinced him that this is what a machine can do. He wrote, "That this really is the correct definition of mechanical computability was established beyond any doubt by Turing.'' Church felt the same way, writing that Turing machines have "the advantage of making the identification with effectiveness ... evident immediately.''
  - cfcf14 5y ago
    Wonderful explanation, thank you.
  - 5y ago
wombatmobile 5y ago
> I don't understand why Schmidhuber continues to ignore this crucial point. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. But wait a minute, you might say, facts are facts. And if everyone had the time and resources to discover and digest every fact, your understanding would be the end of it. But everyone doesn't have time and resources. To compensate, we rely on others to curate facts for us. When we encounter an internally consistent subset of facts that suits our ideals and our interests, we adopt that point of view. There are infinitely many subsets of curated facts that can be presented as internally consistent. That's why there are so many different points of view. What bearing does this have on Turing's role in computer science, and his latter day fame in a society which came to be defined by silicone logic? The First Computers Were Human (and Mostly Women) https://mjosefweber.medium.com/the-first-computers-were-human-and-mostly-women-b0d9bbff5a98 https://mjosefweber.medium.com/the-first-computers-were-huma... Turing, in addition to stating an ontology of computing, dared to invite the question, what is the difference between a computer and a human?
- jterrys 5y ago
  >https://mjosefweber.medium.com/the-first-computers-were-huma https://mjosefweber.medium.com/the-first-computers-were-huma... I cringe when I read ill-researched essays like these because it informs a relationship between women and computing that back then genuinely did not exist. For the vast, vast majority of women in the field of computing at this time, they were nothing more than glorified calculators. Yes, there were a few women scientists and mathematicians (by few, I mean literally handfuls). Yes, it was a male dominated field. But the overwhelming majority of women working in this industry at this time did secretarial style busywork. It wasn't glorious. It was underappreciated. It sucked. These types of essays are a genuine attempt to rewrite a history that did not exist. It is literary gaslighting the likes of which the article we are discussing right now is attempting to rectify.
  - wombatmobile 5y ago
    > These types of essays are a genuine attempt to rewrite a history that did not exist. I'm not sure what you are saying? Could you clarify? What is "secretarial style busywork"? Is this article also "ill-researched"? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-computers-180972202/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-... What would a better researched view of history say? I'm not trying to troll you or make you write an essay here - just trying to glean the main points of what you believe so I can see your point of view. Are you familiar with the view that the "Turing Test" was first conceived by Turing as a challenge to discern the gender of a human hidden behind a screen? In my comment I was trying to point to Turing's interests in the nature of gender and humanity. I find that expansive and prescient in the sense that "computing" to us moderns is more about NLP than calculating maths, and yet, it's all the same thing under the hood.
dralley 5y ago
Likewise, people dispute that Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, because Babbage and Menabrea had previously created a few simple example programs. But that downplays her accomplishments too much. She didn't write the "first program" but she was the first to understand what computers would be capable of doing (for example, that by assigning numbers to letters and symbols, computers could do more than simply perform numerical computations), and she was the first to invent foundational control flow structures such as loops and conditionals. Her program was much more rigorously defined and sophisticated than any previous examples. >The longest program that Menabrea presented was 11 operations long and contained no loops or branches; Lovelace’s program contains 25 operations and a nested loop (and thus branching). https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-g.html https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-g.htm... https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-t... https://projectlovelace.net/static_prod/img/Diagram_for_the_computation_of_Bernoulli_numbers.jpg https://projectlovelace.net/static_prod/img/Diagram_for_the_...
- dilap 5y ago
  I really enjoyed Stephen Wolfram's mini-bio of her. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-t... I very much recoginized from that that she had the attitude and experience of a "programmer," so I would say she was the first programmer, in the modern sense.
  - extr 5y ago
    Wow, thanks for the link. Really interesting story, fascinating to think about what could have been if she hadn't died so young.
    - e12e 5y ago
      "It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with. This it is calculated to effect primarily and chiefly of course, through its executive faculties; but it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself in another manner. For, in so distributing and combining the truths and the formulæ of analysis, that they may become most easily and rapidly amenable to the mechanical combinations of the engine, the relations and the nature of many subjects in that science are necessarily thrown into new lights, and more profoundly investigated. This is a decidedly indirect, and a somewhat speculative, consequence of such an invention. It is however pretty evident, on general principles, that in devising for mathematical truths a new form in which to record and throw themselves out for actual use, views are likely to be induced, which should again react on the more theoretical phase of the subject. There are in all extensions of human power, or additions to human knowledge, various collateral influences, besides the main and primary object attained." -- Ada Lovelace, 1842 http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html
cs702 5y ago
Jürgen Schmidhuber has a track record of complaining about unfairness in the conventionally accepted view of the scientific record, especially in the English-speaking world. For instance, he has claimed for years that his own early research on AI has been unfairly overlooked or ignored by a "conspiracy" (his word, not mine).[a] At one point, the NY Times called him the "Rodney Dangerfield of AI research" because he doesn't get the respect he deserves.[b] Ultimately, as always, credit will be assigned by future generations of scientists and historians long after everyone who is alive today has disappeared from the face of the earth. Many disagreements that seem important now will be forgotten. Many findings that seem important now will turn out not be. Many names that are very prominent now will fade into obscurity. As always. [a] https://people.idsia.ch//~juergen/deep-learning-conspiracy.html https://people.idsia.ch//~juergen/deep-learning-conspiracy.h... [b] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/technology/artificial-intelligence-pioneer-jurgen-schmidhuber-overlooked.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/technology/artificial-int...
- etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
  See also: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Schmidhubris https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Schmidhubris
- coldtea 5y ago
  >Jürgen Schmidhuber has a track record of complaining about unfairness in the conventionally accepted view of the scientific record, especially in the English-speaking world. So, he has >Ultimately, as always, credit will be assigned by future generations of scientists and historians long after everyone who is alive today has disappeared from the face of the earth. Well, credit for the field of CS is already applied now, and also yesterday and 20 years ago. It's not like this future credit would be the first such, or that it would be more accurat (or that it would not feed of the current popular views).
- slavik81 5y ago
  > But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity... Herostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it... Who knows whether the best of men be known? Or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? ~ Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia (1658)
yesOfCourse9 5y ago
He does not? He is crafting a tapestry not being black and white. They all worked together to refine an overall concept and get somewhere useable. IMO it’s the simpler mind that needs a stark black and white assignment. Talk about missing the forest for a tree. Constantly iterating which daddy figure should be on top of the mental hierarchy, when clearly it’s network effects. Humanity is still emerging from its mental models of society of old.
SquishyPanda23 5y ago
> Turing Machines, on the other hand, were instantly obviously mechanizable. It was clear that one could build a physical machine to run any Turing program without human input. Harold Abelson points out in one of his lectures [0] that computer science isn't about computers any more than biology is about microscopes. From that perspective, it is clear that Turing found an existing discipline of computer science and made major contributions to it. But it doesn't really seem right to say that he invented or founded computer science. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J_xL4IGhJA&list=PLE18841CABEA24090 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J_xL4IGhJA&list=PLE18841CAB...
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  Computer Science is about what computers can do. To decide the latter, you have to first decide what a computer is. Turing Machines were the first abstractions that intuitively captured what it means to compute something
  - dnautics 5y ago
    that's not the case, according to the article. If anything the article implies the opposite. Turing machines were a re-abstraction of Godel's computational model that provided a path to mechanical realization. Also if you ever work with the turing machine (NFA hooked up to an infinite recording tape) it is not at all "intuitive" that this construction comprehensively captures the world of computation.
    - Ar-Curunir 5y ago
      Godel's computational model does not intuitively capture what it means to compute. Godel himself was unconvinced that his model was universal, and it took Turing's paper to convince him that his model, lambda calculus, and Turing machines were equivalent and universal.
  - SquishyPanda23 5y ago
    Sure, if you take "computer" to mean "something that computes". In that case it would include humans. There was a great deal of research into things that can be effectively computed that goes back even before the focus of this article. And of course "computer" used to refer to humans who computed before the invention of mechanical computers. But it's certainly not the study of what mechanical computers can do. Among other things, mechanical computers all have bounded resources unlike Turing machines.
Grimm1 5y ago
As someone said to me recently, Schmidhuber may have a few points about lack of credit regarding his work but him having invented everything to do with modern NNs is a wild claim and regardless he has cemented himself as a boor and continues to double down. This is just another example of that doubling down.
dnautics 5y ago
> I don't understand why Schmidhuber continues to ignore this crucial point. From TFA: > There is a seemingly minor difference whose significance emerged only later. Many of Gödel's instruction sequences were series of multiplications of number-coded storage contents by integers. Gödel did not care that the computational complexity of such multiplications tends to increase with storage size. Similarly, Church also ignored the context-dependent spatio-temporal complexity of the basic instructions in his algorithms. Turing and Post, however, adopted a traditional, reductionist, minimalist, binary view of computing. Their machine models permitted only very simple elementary binary instructions with constant complexity, like the early binary machine model of Leibniz (1679)[L79][LA14][HO66] and Zuse's 1936 patent application... I presume by "seemingly minor" Schmidhuber implies "it turns out to be very important".
- lostmsu 5y ago
  It is important for engineering, but as far as I understand it is not that important for math. E.g. Gödel solved the completeness and consistency problems, and Church first solved the decidability.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    The OP itself documents: > Nevertheless, according to Wang,[WA74-96] it was Turing's work (1936) that convinced Gödel of the universality of both his own approach (1931-34) and Church's (1935). Unless "according to Wang" is meant as "I don't know if I believe it", then apparently it's documented that Godel himself thought Turing's contribution was major and shed important light on the mathematical implications of godel's own work. There's never any one person that invents anything, it's always built on work that came before. Reading the OP, I got increasingly bored and tired... ok, what's your point? Yes, clearly Godel and Church especially did foundational work without which Turing's work would not be possible -- and I don't think anyone denies it, anyone with any kind of computer science education is surely familiar with Godel and Church. It's not like they are languishing in obscurity, they are both very well known and respected! Godel especially is widely considered a real giant in his fields. I am as confident that neither Godel nor Church is going to be forgotten for many generations. But Turing made important contributions that took important steps necessary for the development of CS as a field. It's not a mystery or undeserved why Turing's name ends up remembered. The OP's point is just that any singular "inventor" is always building on work of may who have come before? OK, sure. Boring. So we should never promote anyone as making important foundational contributions? Well, people aren't gonna stop. Boring.
sytelus 5y ago
Computers we use are nothing like Turing machine and if you want to credit one person for computer design than it would be van Neumann. Media needs hero worship. It doesn't matter who will be hero but they must have one. This applies to every field. Every scientist, enterprenuer, artist is overblown. Older they are, more overblown they are. The worse case is movie actors who literally everyone knows are not "hero" but just the human puppets who move and behaves as how directors asks and writers dictact, but in the eye of people they are literally called "hero" and "star". The people moving these puppets are only mentioned in credits who no one reads.
- wedowhatwedo 5y ago
  Best I can tell, von Neumann stole the design that bears his name from John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. von Neumann doesn't seem to deserve as much much credit as he is given. I'm not saying he does not deserve credit for his other work.
  - toyg 5y ago
    Both you and parent are correct: Von Neumann knew how to play the game to end up with "the credits people do read".
mananaysiempre 5y ago
And Schönfinkel’s combinatory logic ten years earlier (we are talking priority here, right?) was even more awkward. There’s also the point (mentioned e.g. by Wadler in his “Propositions as types” talk) that Gödel didn’t actually realize how pervasive universal computation was and actively pushed back against Turing proclaining the equivalence. This is not to accuse him—he wasn’t particularly obstinate or unfair about it and, furthermore, came to understand the idea fairly quickly. But it’s not at all uncommon in science for the one who actually invented a thing to fail to realize what it was that they just invented, and somebody else comes years or in some unfortunate cases decades later and announces the founding of a new area of knowledge on that already-discovered site. Whom the later naming will associate with the discovery is a toss-up, but it’s generally fair and in good taste, I think, to mention both.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
> Similarly, there's no clear way how to mechanize lambda calculus. Is Lisp such a mechanization?
- jecel 5y ago
  Any computer (with enough resources) can simulate any other computer. So if you have Lisp by running such a simulation (interpreter) on your PC it is not the same thing as a direct implementation of lambda calculus. The famous Lisp Machines of the 1980s were reasonably traditional Von Neumann computers with nice features like tagged memory and optimized stacks. Much closer to mechanizing lambda calculus, but still a bit Von Neumannish, is the SECD virtual machine for Lisp and friends: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECD_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECD_machine
- bo1024 5y ago
  I'd say no, not on its own. It's not clear how to implement a Lisp program in hardware. You need some steps which today involve a von Neumann architecture and an imperative assembly language that implement Lisp constructs...

by bo1024 5y ago

KingOfCoders 5y ago

"For example, it was claimed that Turing founded computer science.[...] Turing's 1936 paper provided the "theoretical backbone" for all computers to come." So your argument is, because it is unclear how to "physically implement the arbitrary-function minimization operator", Turing is the better "theoretical backbone" and has founded computer science?

3pt14159 5y ago
Not OP, but I agree with them. The word computer means multiple things. In one sense it the abstraction of universal computation. Imagine a world where actual physical computers didn't progress to universal computation, but were stuck being purpose built to the present day. The field of computer science would be utterly different because they couldn't actually compute anything with their science. They could just discuss computability in an abstract sense. It'd be like physics without the particle colliders or telescopes or lasers. I think of the founders of computer science more like the founding fathers of America, rather than a single guy named Turing, but some are more memorable than others.
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  The article writes about your point of general computation and purpose built computers: "Likewise, Konrad Zuse never got a Turing award despite having created the world's first working programmable general computer 1935-41. [...] It was pointed out that none of the computers built during the 1940s were influenced in any way by Turing's 1936 theoretical paper, [...]"
- mr_toad 5y ago
  > Imagine a world where actual physical computers didn't progress to universal computation, but were stuck being purpose built It’s not clear that you need a theory of computation to build a stored process computer. You might not clearly understand the theoretical capability of such a machine , but that wouldn’t prevent you from doing many useful things with it.
bo1024 5y ago
I don't think it's important to quibble over who's overrated or underrated among these giants of math and CS who already get tons of recognition (I'm glad Schmidhuber brings many other historical names into the narrative). However, yes, I do think that 'mechanization' or physical implementation is a crucial piece of Turing's contribution that is wrongly ignored in this article. And I think without mechanization, there is no CS as we understand it.
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  I can only repeat my comment from down: "Likewise, Konrad Zuse never got a Turing award despite having created the world's first working programmable general computer 1935-41. [...] It was pointed out that none of the computers built during the 1940s were influenced in any way by Turing's 1936 theoretical paper, [...]"
  - obastani 5y ago
    As far as I know, Konrad Zuse didn't prove that this strategy was a universal model of computation. In contrast, Turing proved that his universal machine could emulate any other machine, given the right program. In my view, Turing's contribution is providing a plausible definition of computation along with a deep and comprehensive theoretical characterization of the properties of this model of computation. This is why Turing machines form the basis of theoretical computer science, and not other models such as lambda calculus. I think saying that Turing machines were adopted since they were merely more convenient is highly misleading. I think this pattern repeats a lot: There are many cases where you can point to multiple people who invented similar ideas around the same time, but it is typically the person who provided the most deep and comprehensive treatment of the subject that ultimately gets most of the credit. This depth is not conveyed in pop science attributions such as "Turing invented computation", but this doesn't mean Turing doesn't deserve the credit.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    I don't believe anyone has received a Turing award for creating a working computer.
w-j-w 5y ago
I think that proving computers could exist in physical reality satisfies this claim very well
jimhefferon 5y ago
The question in the air in 36-ish was something like, "OK, clearly we can mechanically compute things like the sum of two numbers or the prime factorization of a number. But are there other things that can be computed with a discrete and deterministic mechanism?" (At the time they called these "effective" functions.) Church had piles of stuff that he and his students produced that were computable with the lambda calculus. Basically, all of the natural number functions that a person thinks are intuitively mechanically computable, those folks had showed how to lambda compute. With this evidence, he proposed to Godel (they were working together at Princeton at the time), who was considered the world's expert, taking "lambda-calculable" as a mathematically precise version of "mechanically computable." But Godel was notoriously careful, and he did not accept the thought as perfectly clear. That is, they had a subset of the things that could be mechanically computed. But was it the entire set? Or was there something that some discrete and deterministic mechanism could be made to do that would lead to more than Church's set? Imagine you are Dedekind and you are looking at the primitive recursive functions and (1) any such function is intuitively mechanically computable, and (2) you are able to work out how to define a pile of things like prime factorization of an integer using this system. You might well conjucture that this is it. But we know (and Godel and Church and Turing knew) that this is not it, that you need to add unbounded search of some kind (this is what minimization does) to get more things that are intuitively mechanically computable. I agree that the minimization operator is not as easy to picture with gears and levers as some of the other operations. But the issue in 36 was that a person could worry that there was even more. Just as minimization is not as easy to picture and the need for it didn't hit Dedekind with great force, could there be something else out there that we have all missed? That worry disappeared when Godel read Turing's masterful analysis. It convinced him that this is what a machine can do. He wrote, "That this really is the correct definition of mechanical computability was established beyond any doubt by Turing.'' Church felt the same way, writing that Turing machines have "the advantage of making the identification with effectiveness ... evident immediately.''
- cfcf14 5y ago
  Wonderful explanation, thank you.
- 5y ago

wombatmobile 5y ago

> I don't understand why Schmidhuber continues to ignore this crucial point. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. But wait a minute, you might say, facts are facts. And if everyone had the time and resources to discover and digest every fact, your understanding would be the end of it. But everyone doesn't have time and resources. To compensate, we rely on others to curate facts for us. When we encounter an internally consistent subset of facts that suits our ideals and our interests, we adopt that point of view. There are infinitely many subsets of curated facts that can be presented as internally consistent. That's why there are so many different points of view. What bearing does this have on Turing's role in computer science, and his latter day fame in a society which came to be defined by silicone logic? The First Computers Were Human (and Mostly Women) https://mjosefweber.medium.com/the-first-computers-were-human-and-mostly-women-b0d9bbff5a98 https://mjosefweber.medium.com/the-first-computers-were-huma... Turing, in addition to stating an ontology of computing, dared to invite the question, what is the difference between a computer and a human?

jterrys 5y ago
>https://mjosefweber.medium.com/the-first-computers-were-huma https://mjosefweber.medium.com/the-first-computers-were-huma... I cringe when I read ill-researched essays like these because it informs a relationship between women and computing that back then genuinely did not exist. For the vast, vast majority of women in the field of computing at this time, they were nothing more than glorified calculators. Yes, there were a few women scientists and mathematicians (by few, I mean literally handfuls). Yes, it was a male dominated field. But the overwhelming majority of women working in this industry at this time did secretarial style busywork. It wasn't glorious. It was underappreciated. It sucked. These types of essays are a genuine attempt to rewrite a history that did not exist. It is literary gaslighting the likes of which the article we are discussing right now is attempting to rectify.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  > These types of essays are a genuine attempt to rewrite a history that did not exist. I'm not sure what you are saying? Could you clarify? What is "secretarial style busywork"? Is this article also "ill-researched"? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-computers-180972202/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-... What would a better researched view of history say? I'm not trying to troll you or make you write an essay here - just trying to glean the main points of what you believe so I can see your point of view. Are you familiar with the view that the "Turing Test" was first conceived by Turing as a challenge to discern the gender of a human hidden behind a screen? In my comment I was trying to point to Turing's interests in the nature of gender and humanity. I find that expansive and prescient in the sense that "computing" to us moderns is more about NLP than calculating maths, and yet, it's all the same thing under the hood.

dralley 5y ago

Likewise, people dispute that Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, because Babbage and Menabrea had previously created a few simple example programs. But that downplays her accomplishments too much. She didn't write the "first program" but she was the first to understand what computers would be capable of doing (for example, that by assigning numbers to letters and symbols, computers could do more than simply perform numerical computations), and she was the first to invent foundational control flow structures such as loops and conditionals. Her program was much more rigorously defined and sophisticated than any previous examples. >The longest program that Menabrea presented was 11 operations long and contained no loops or branches; Lovelace’s program contains 25 operations and a nested loop (and thus branching). https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-g.html https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-g.htm... https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-t... https://projectlovelace.net/static_prod/img/Diagram_for_the_computation_of_Bernoulli_numbers.jpg https://projectlovelace.net/static_prod/img/Diagram_for_the_...

dilap 5y ago
I really enjoyed Stephen Wolfram's mini-bio of her. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-t... I very much recoginized from that that she had the attitude and experience of a "programmer," so I would say she was the first programmer, in the modern sense.
- extr 5y ago
  Wow, thanks for the link. Really interesting story, fascinating to think about what could have been if she hadn't died so young.
  - e12e 5y ago
    "It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with. This it is calculated to effect primarily and chiefly of course, through its executive faculties; but it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself in another manner. For, in so distributing and combining the truths and the formulæ of analysis, that they may become most easily and rapidly amenable to the mechanical combinations of the engine, the relations and the nature of many subjects in that science are necessarily thrown into new lights, and more profoundly investigated. This is a decidedly indirect, and a somewhat speculative, consequence of such an invention. It is however pretty evident, on general principles, that in devising for mathematical truths a new form in which to record and throw themselves out for actual use, views are likely to be induced, which should again react on the more theoretical phase of the subject. There are in all extensions of human power, or additions to human knowledge, various collateral influences, besides the main and primary object attained." -- Ada Lovelace, 1842 http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html

cs702 5y ago

Jürgen Schmidhuber has a track record of complaining about unfairness in the conventionally accepted view of the scientific record, especially in the English-speaking world. For instance, he has claimed for years that his own early research on AI has been unfairly overlooked or ignored by a "conspiracy" (his word, not mine).[a] At one point, the NY Times called him the "Rodney Dangerfield of AI research" because he doesn't get the respect he deserves.[b] Ultimately, as always, credit will be assigned by future generations of scientists and historians long after everyone who is alive today has disappeared from the face of the earth. Many disagreements that seem important now will be forgotten. Many findings that seem important now will turn out not be. Many names that are very prominent now will fade into obscurity. As always. [a] https://people.idsia.ch//~juergen/deep-learning-conspiracy.html https://people.idsia.ch//~juergen/deep-learning-conspiracy.h... [b] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/technology/artificial-intelligence-pioneer-jurgen-schmidhuber-overlooked.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/technology/artificial-int...

etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
See also: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Schmidhubris https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Schmidhubris
coldtea 5y ago
>Jürgen Schmidhuber has a track record of complaining about unfairness in the conventionally accepted view of the scientific record, especially in the English-speaking world. So, he has >Ultimately, as always, credit will be assigned by future generations of scientists and historians long after everyone who is alive today has disappeared from the face of the earth. Well, credit for the field of CS is already applied now, and also yesterday and 20 years ago. It's not like this future credit would be the first such, or that it would be more accurat (or that it would not feed of the current popular views).
slavik81 5y ago
> But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity... Herostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it... Who knows whether the best of men be known? Or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? ~ Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia (1658)

yesOfCourse9 5y ago

He does not? He is crafting a tapestry not being black and white. They all worked together to refine an overall concept and get somewhere useable. IMO it’s the simpler mind that needs a stark black and white assignment. Talk about missing the forest for a tree. Constantly iterating which daddy figure should be on top of the mental hierarchy, when clearly it’s network effects. Humanity is still emerging from its mental models of society of old.

SquishyPanda23 5y ago

> Turing Machines, on the other hand, were instantly obviously mechanizable. It was clear that one could build a physical machine to run any Turing program without human input. Harold Abelson points out in one of his lectures [0] that computer science isn't about computers any more than biology is about microscopes. From that perspective, it is clear that Turing found an existing discipline of computer science and made major contributions to it. But it doesn't really seem right to say that he invented or founded computer science. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J_xL4IGhJA&list=PLE18841CABEA24090 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J_xL4IGhJA&list=PLE18841CAB...

Ar-Curunir 5y ago
Computer Science is about what computers can do. To decide the latter, you have to first decide what a computer is. Turing Machines were the first abstractions that intuitively captured what it means to compute something
- dnautics 5y ago
  that's not the case, according to the article. If anything the article implies the opposite. Turing machines were a re-abstraction of Godel's computational model that provided a path to mechanical realization. Also if you ever work with the turing machine (NFA hooked up to an infinite recording tape) it is not at all "intuitive" that this construction comprehensively captures the world of computation.
  - Ar-Curunir 5y ago
    Godel's computational model does not intuitively capture what it means to compute. Godel himself was unconvinced that his model was universal, and it took Turing's paper to convince him that his model, lambda calculus, and Turing machines were equivalent and universal.
- SquishyPanda23 5y ago
  Sure, if you take "computer" to mean "something that computes". In that case it would include humans. There was a great deal of research into things that can be effectively computed that goes back even before the focus of this article. And of course "computer" used to refer to humans who computed before the invention of mechanical computers. But it's certainly not the study of what mechanical computers can do. Among other things, mechanical computers all have bounded resources unlike Turing machines.

Grimm1 5y ago

As someone said to me recently, Schmidhuber may have a few points about lack of credit regarding his work but him having invented everything to do with modern NNs is a wild claim and regardless he has cemented himself as a boor and continues to double down. This is just another example of that doubling down.

dnautics 5y ago

> I don't understand why Schmidhuber continues to ignore this crucial point. From TFA: > There is a seemingly minor difference whose significance emerged only later. Many of Gödel's instruction sequences were series of multiplications of number-coded storage contents by integers. Gödel did not care that the computational complexity of such multiplications tends to increase with storage size. Similarly, Church also ignored the context-dependent spatio-temporal complexity of the basic instructions in his algorithms. Turing and Post, however, adopted a traditional, reductionist, minimalist, binary view of computing. Their machine models permitted only very simple elementary binary instructions with constant complexity, like the early binary machine model of Leibniz (1679)[L79][LA14][HO66] and Zuse's 1936 patent application... I presume by "seemingly minor" Schmidhuber implies "it turns out to be very important".

lostmsu 5y ago
It is important for engineering, but as far as I understand it is not that important for math. E.g. Gödel solved the completeness and consistency problems, and Church first solved the decidability.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  The OP itself documents: > Nevertheless, according to Wang,[WA74-96] it was Turing's work (1936) that convinced Gödel of the universality of both his own approach (1931-34) and Church's (1935). Unless "according to Wang" is meant as "I don't know if I believe it", then apparently it's documented that Godel himself thought Turing's contribution was major and shed important light on the mathematical implications of godel's own work. There's never any one person that invents anything, it's always built on work that came before. Reading the OP, I got increasingly bored and tired... ok, what's your point? Yes, clearly Godel and Church especially did foundational work without which Turing's work would not be possible -- and I don't think anyone denies it, anyone with any kind of computer science education is surely familiar with Godel and Church. It's not like they are languishing in obscurity, they are both very well known and respected! Godel especially is widely considered a real giant in his fields. I am as confident that neither Godel nor Church is going to be forgotten for many generations. But Turing made important contributions that took important steps necessary for the development of CS as a field. It's not a mystery or undeserved why Turing's name ends up remembered. The OP's point is just that any singular "inventor" is always building on work of may who have come before? OK, sure. Boring. So we should never promote anyone as making important foundational contributions? Well, people aren't gonna stop. Boring.

sytelus 5y ago

Computers we use are nothing like Turing machine and if you want to credit one person for computer design than it would be van Neumann. Media needs hero worship. It doesn't matter who will be hero but they must have one. This applies to every field. Every scientist, enterprenuer, artist is overblown. Older they are, more overblown they are. The worse case is movie actors who literally everyone knows are not "hero" but just the human puppets who move and behaves as how directors asks and writers dictact, but in the eye of people they are literally called "hero" and "star". The people moving these puppets are only mentioned in credits who no one reads.

wedowhatwedo 5y ago
Best I can tell, von Neumann stole the design that bears his name from John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. von Neumann doesn't seem to deserve as much much credit as he is given. I'm not saying he does not deserve credit for his other work.
- toyg 5y ago
  Both you and parent are correct: Von Neumann knew how to play the game to end up with "the credits people do read".

mananaysiempre 5y ago

And Schönfinkel’s combinatory logic ten years earlier (we are talking priority here, right?) was even more awkward. There’s also the point (mentioned e.g. by Wadler in his “Propositions as types” talk) that Gödel didn’t actually realize how pervasive universal computation was and actively pushed back against Turing proclaining the equivalence. This is not to accuse him—he wasn’t particularly obstinate or unfair about it and, furthermore, came to understand the idea fairly quickly. But it’s not at all uncommon in science for the one who actually invented a thing to fail to realize what it was that they just invented, and somebody else comes years or in some unfortunate cases decades later and announces the founding of a new area of knowledge on that already-discovered site. Whom the later naming will associate with the discovery is a toss-up, but it’s generally fair and in good taste, I think, to mention both.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

> Similarly, there's no clear way how to mechanize lambda calculus. Is Lisp such a mechanization?

jecel 5y ago
Any computer (with enough resources) can simulate any other computer. So if you have Lisp by running such a simulation (interpreter) on your PC it is not the same thing as a direct implementation of lambda calculus. The famous Lisp Machines of the 1980s were reasonably traditional Von Neumann computers with nice features like tagged memory and optimized stacks. Much closer to mechanizing lambda calculus, but still a bit Von Neumannish, is the SECD virtual machine for Lisp and friends: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECD_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECD_machine
bo1024 5y ago
I'd say no, not on its own. It's not clear how to implement a Lisp program in hardware. You need some steps which today involve a von Neumann architecture and an imperative assembly language that implement Lisp constructs...