If not for Alan Turing we might all be speaking German right now. Or not, but regardless Alan Turing was one of Britain’s finest minds and did more than almost anyone to…
One of the very interesting people I met at How The Light Gets In was the writer and filmmaker David Malone. In conversation with him and (it was a very weird weekend, okay?) Michael Nyman and the head of cultural affairs at the Mexican embassy to the UK, he’d mentioned that some of his work had been uploaded by other people to the net. Also, that his preferred form, the lyric televisual essay, had gone out of fashion. As I’ve noted here more than once, proper rhetorical television isn’t really made any more.
So I went looking, when I got home. And I found his DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE:
In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians – Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing – whose genius
Vint Cerf was one of the main forces behind the creation of the Internet as we know it today. He is accorded elder statesman status, but is in fact still very active…
Alan Turing, perhaps the greatest computer scientist ever, famous for breaking the Germans’ Enigma code in World War II, wrote two papers on code breaking that have just been released by Britain’s spy center, GCHQ. From BBC News:
Two 70-year-old papers by Alan Turing on the theory of code breaking have been released by the government’s communications headquarters, GCHQ.
It is believed Turing wrote the papers while at Bletchley Park working on breaking German Enigma codes. A GCHQ mathematician said the fact that the contents had been restricted “shows what a tremendous importance it has in the foundations of our subject”.
It comes amid celebrations to mark the centenary of Turing’s birth. The two papers are now available to view at the National Archives at Kew, west London. GCHQ was able to approximately date the papers because in one example Turing had made reference to Hitler’s age.
Computers may now be able to win on Jeopardy, but they still cannot quite trick us into thinking that they are flesh and blood. Writing for the The Atlantic, Brian Christian discusses…