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Turing's Universal Machine voted most important past British innovation
- jgrahamc 14y agoThe curious thing (when compared to the other things that were being voted for) is that the Universal Turing Machine is an _idea_ and not a device in any practical sense. It's probably lost on most people that Turing never intended his machine to be built, it was entirely thought up to answer a question in mathematical logic.
- greenyoda 14y agoNor could one ever be built, since Turing Machines have features like infinite tape memories, which would be rather difficult to manufacture. One could argue that Turing's contributions to cryptanalysis (e.g., breaking the German Enigma cipher) might have had an even greater effect on the world: in the grand scheme of things, defeating Nazi Germany was probably more important than paving the way for computers and the internet.
- jlgreco 14y agoI'm not quite convinced that is what I would call an "innovation" per se, that is not quite how I think of the word; accepting that though, it is clearly a good choice.
- danso 14y agoIf you had told me there were five inventions by the Brits (in the last 100 years) greater than the World Wide Web, I would've been stumped.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Turing_Machine 14y agoHere's my take: without the theory of computation, there wouldn't be a web, nor would there be many of the other innovations on the list (e.g., CT scans).
- jerf 14y agoMost important British innovation, heck, a case can be made that it is the single most important human innovation ever made. It hugely impacted everything from the purest of mathematics to the most mundane of modern practical concerns. As always, he stood on the shoulder of giants, of course, but he saw further.
- SeanDav 14y agoDon't agree here. You have to set a category, unless you are claiming that the Turing Universal Machine is a greater invention than the transistor, or penicillin or the wheel or fire or writing etc etc.
- jlgreco 14y agoI'd say it is more important than all of those, save writing. Both writing and the idea of mechanical computation represent fundamental leaps in human development. They change what we are, not just the comfort in which we live.
- Turing_Machine 14y agoRight. Penicillin was important, but there are other antibiotics. The transistor was also important, but there are alternatives that might have been used (e.g. techniques based on optics). The theory of computation is absolutely fundamental.
- SeanDav 14y agoCharles Babbage had a working computer long before Turin. If he could have implemented it in transistors or even valves rather than mechanical relays how much further would we have been today? The way I see it, you don't need to understand the theory of computation to solve probably any problem that is solvable via computation. Given, it would be potentially far less efficient but not fundamental.
- 14y ago
- stygianguest 14y agoSomehow this would be the first election where an army of botnets voting seems appropriate.
- babesh 14y agoBabbage machine predated Turing by a good number of years.
- 14113 14y agoBabbage's machine was really a glorified calculator. Turing's conceptual machine is a way of representing what computation fundamentally is.
- Bud 14y agoI think what's also cool about this page is that the MINI was #2. The Turing Machine barely beat out the MINI, 18% to 17%. http://www.topbritishinnovations.org/PastInnovations/BMCMini.aspx http://www.topbritishinnovations.org/PastInnovations/BMCMini...
- notahacker 14y agoIt looks like a poll hijacked by Mini and steam train enthusiast groups. The Mini and Mallard were nice pieces of engineering, but you'd have to be a pretty hardcore fan to place them on a pedestal above the jet engine or medicinal use of penicillin or decoding DNA (or even relatively mundane things like radar and ultrasound) as significant examples of innovation.
- Bud 14y agoI would have to reluctantly grant this point. ;) Although they did make a fairly good case that the MINI did contain some innovations which were significant at least within the auto industry. (Disclaimer: I sure do like my MINI.) I think Tim Berners-Lee should have ranked higher, too, btw.