IDT Open Seminar

ALAN TURING AND

HIS LEGACY
100 Years Turing celebration

Gordana Dodig Crnkovic,

Computer Science and Network Department
Mälardalen University
March 8th 2012
[Link]
[Link]

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 2012 ALAN TURING YEAR

2012 has been officially

declared Alan Turing Year
to celebrate the centenary
of his birth.

[Link] (2 min) Alan Turing Documentary

[Link] (4.27 min) Remembering Alan Turing

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 TURING RESOURCES

Alan Turing as a
• founder of computability theory,
• mathematician,
• philosopher,
• codebreaker,
• natural philosopher,
• visionary man before his time:

[Link]
Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot
[Link] The Alan Turing Home Page, Andrew Hodges

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 VIDEO
[Link] (2 min) Alan Turing Documentary Teaser

[Link] (4.27 min) Remembering Alan Turing

[Link] (6 min) The Dream Machine - BBC - Giant Brains 4

[Link] (90 min) Turing Biography

[Link] (44 min) Dangerous Knowledge (part 2)

[Link] (44 min) Dangerous Knowledge (part 1)

[Link] (0.26 min) LEGO Turing machine

[Link] (3 min) DNA Transcription and Protein Assembly

[Link] (3.17 min) (in Spanish, beautiful documentary material)

[Link] (part 1) (5.53 min) (Italian, very good documentary material)

[Link] (part 2) (7.29 min) (Italian, rich documentary material)

[Link] (7.27 min) Alan Turing, Enigma

[Link] (9.58 min) The Death of Alan Turing

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 TIMELINE OF ALAN TURING’S LIFE
1912 (23 June): Birth, London
1926-31: Sherborne School
1930: Death of friend Christopher Morcom
1931-34: Undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge University
1932-35: Quantum mechanics, probability, logic
1935: Elected fellow of King's College, Cambridge
1936: The Turing machine, computability, universal machine
1936-38: Princeton University. Ph.D. Logic, algebra, number theory
1938-39: Return to Cambridge. Introduced to German Enigma cipher machine
1939-40: The Bombe, machine for Enigma decryption
1939-42: Breaking of U-boat Enigma, saving battle of the Atlantic

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 TIMELINE OF ALAN TURING’S LIFE
1943-45: Chief Anglo-American crypto consultant. Electronic work.
1945: National Physical Laboratory, London
1946: Computer and software design, world leading.
1947-48: Programming, neural nets, and artificial intelligence
1948: Manchester University
1949: First serious mathematical use of a computer
1950: The Turing Test for machine intelligence
1951: Elected FRS. Non-linear theory of biological growth
1952: Arrested as a homosexual, loss of security clearance
1953-54: Unfinished work in biology and physics
1954 (7/6, 42 years old): Death (suicide) by cyanide poisoning

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2009: APOLOGY
In August 2009, petition started urging the British Government to posthumously apologize to Alan
Turing for prosecuting him as a homosexual. The petition received thousands of signatures. Prime
Minister Gordon Brown acknowledged the petition, releasing a statement on 10 September 2009
apologizing and describing Turing's treatment as "appalling":[

“Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and
recognition of the appalling* way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under
the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course
utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we
all are for what happened to him ...
So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's
work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better.”

* = inexcusable

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TURING’S GROUNDBREAKING
CONTRIBUTIONS
• Logic (Computability)
• Computing (Universal Machine, Stored program,
algorithm)

• Artificial intelligence (Turing Test, ”Unorganized

machines”)

• Biology (Morphogenesis)
• Codebreaking during the WWII (Enigma machine)
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TURING’S PUBLICATIONS

Even though Turing made truly profound impact on

all of the fields he was active in, his production of
published articles was modest – less than 30 in total
from 1937 to 1954.*

*17 years, less than 2 papers published per year

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TURING’S PUBLICATIONS

Mathematical Logic (7)

• On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Proc. Lond. Math.
Soc. (2) 42 pp 230-265 (1936); correction ibid. 43, pp 544-546 (1937).

• Computability and λ-definability, J. Symbolic Logic 2 pp 153-163 (1937)

• The p-function in λ-K conversion, J. Symbolic Logic 2 p 164 (1937)

• Systems of logic based on ordinals, Proc. Lond. Math. Soc (2) 45 pp 161-228 (1939) This was also
Turing's Princeton Ph.D. thesis (1938)
• (with M. H. A. Newman) A formal theorem in Church's theory of types, J. Symbolic Logic 7 pp 28-
33 (1942)

• The use of dots as brackets in Church's system, J. Symbolic Logic 7, pp 146-156 (1942)
• Practical forms of type-theory, J. Symbolic Logic 13, pp 80-94 (1948)
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TURING’S PUBLICATIONS
Mechanical Intelligence (11)
• Proposed Electronic Calculator, Turing's ACE computer plan, was produced as a typescript in early 1946, an internal National
Physical Laboratory document. The original copy is in the (British) National Archives, in the file DSIR 10/385. The report was
first published as the NPL report, Com. Sci. 57 (1972), with a foreword by Donald W. Davies.
• Lecture to the London Mathematical Society, February 1947. Published in 1986 as a companion to the 1946 report in the same
MIT Press volume.
• Intelligent Machinery, report written by Turing for the National Physical Laboratory, 1948. The paper was first published in
1968, within the book Cybernetics: Key Papers, eds. C. R. Evans and A. D. J. Robertson, University Park Press, Baltimore
[Link] Manchester (1968).
• Programmers' Handbook for the Manchester electronic computer, Manchester University Computing Laboratory (1950)
• Local Programming Methods and Conventions, in the Manchester University Computer Inaugural Conference, July 1951.
• Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind 49, pp 433-460 (1950)
• Chess, a subsection of chapter 25, Digital Computers Applied to Games, of Faster than Thought, ed. B. V. Bowden, Pitman,
London (1953)
• Intelligent Machinery: A heretical theory, a talk given by Turing at Manchester, typescript in the Turing Archive, included in
Sara Turing's memoir (see below). Not included in the Collected Works, but included (ed. B. J. Copeland) in K. Furukawa, D.
Michie, S. Muggleton (eds.), Machine Intelligence 15, Oxford University Press (1999) and also in The Essential Turing.
• Can digital computers think?, Radio broadcast, 1951 not included in the Collected Works, but included (ed. B. J. Copeland) in K.
Furukawa, D. Michie, S. Muggleton (eds.), Machine Intelligence 15, Oxford University Press (1999), and in The Essential
Turing.
• Can automatic calculating machines be said to think? Radio broadcast, 1952: discussion with M. H. A. Newman, G. Jefferson,
R. B. Braithwaite, not included in the Collected Works, but included (ed. B. J. Copeland) in K. Furukawa, D. Michie, S.
Muggleton (eds.), Machine Intelligence 15, Oxford University Press (1999), and in The Essential Turing.
• Solvable and Unsolvable Problems, Science News 31, pp 7-23 (1954) 11
TURING’S PUBLICATIONS

Pure Mathematics (8)

• Equivalence of Left and Right Almost Periodicity, J. London Math. Soc. 10, pp 284-285 (1935)
• Finite Approximations to Lie Groups, Ann. of Math. 39 (1), pp 105-111 (1938)
• The Extensions of a Group, Compositio Math. 5, pp 357-367 (1938)
• A Method for the Calculation of the Zeta-Function, Proc. London Math. Soc. (2) pp 180-197 (1943, submitted 1939)
• Rounding-off Errors in Matrix Processes, Quart. J. Mech. Appl. Math. 1, pp 287-308 (1948)
• The Word problem in Semi-Groups with Cancellation, Ann. of Math. 52 (2), pp 491-505 (1950)
• Some Calculations of the Riemann Zeta-function, Proc. London Math. Soc. (3) pp 99-117 (1953)
• Solvable and Unsolvable Problems, Science News 31, pp 7-23 (1954) is included in this volume of the Collected Works as well
as in the Mechanical Intelligence volume.

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TURING’S PUBLICATIONS

Morphogenesis (1)
The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. London B 237 pp 37-72 (1952).
[Link]

On Turing’s morphogenesis:
[Link]

[Link]
Alan Turing’s Patterns in Nature, and Beyond

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 AXIOMATIZATION/ AUTOMATIZATION
OF MATHEMATICS
HILBERT’S PROGRAM, 1900

Hilbert’s hope was that mathematics would be reducible to

finding proofs (manipulating the strings of symbols) from a
fixed system of axioms, axioms that everyone could agree
were true.

Can all of mathematics be made algorithmic?

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TURING MACHINES AND COMPUTABILITY

Turing made the idea of algorithm precise, relating

algorithm to the property of computability. Turing wrote:
“The "computable" numbers may be described briefly as the
real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are
calculable by finite means... a number is computable if its
decimal can be written down by a machine. “
[Link]

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TURING MACHINES AND COMPUTABILITY

The Turing machine (LCM, Logical Computing Machine)

concept involves specifying a very simple set of logical
operations, but Turing showed how other more complex
mathematical procedures could be built out of these atomic
components.
Turing argued that his formalism was sufficiently general to
encompass anything that a human being could do when
carrying out a definite (mechanical, effective) method.

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TURING MACHINES USED IN A MODELLING
OF MORE COMPLEX SYSTEMS

Simplified, one can say: anything

can be used to model anything else
– in some way. The question is how
meaningful (or applicable or
adequate) the model is.

[Link] More about Turing Machine

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SUCCESSES OF INTELLIGENT MACHINERY,
WITHIN TURING MACHINE PARADIGM

DEEP BLUE WINNING OVER CHESS MASTER

CASPAROV

WATSON WINNING JEOPARDY

But: as soon as it works it is no more considered to be intelligence!

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BEYOND THE TM MODEL

Turing did not show that his machines can solve any problem that can be
solved "by instructions, explicitly stated rules, or procedures", nor did he
prove that the universal Turing machine "can compute any function that
any computer, with any architecture, can compute".

He proved that his universal machine can compute any function that any
Turing machine can compute.
But a thesis concerning the extent of procedures of a certain sort that a
human being unaided by machinery is capable of carrying out -- carries no
implication concerning the extent of the procedures that machines are
capable of carrying out, even machines acting in accordance with ‘explicitly
stated rules’. For among a machine's repertoire of atomic operations there
may be those that no human being unaided by machinery can perform.

Copeland, B. Jack, "The Church-Turing Thesis", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N.
Zalta (ed.), URL = <[Link] 19
BIOLOGICALLY INSPIRED
”UNORGANIZED MACHINES”

In a far-sighted 1948 report Alan Turing suggested that the

infant human cortex was an "unorganized machine".
Turing defined the class of unorganized machines as
largely random in their initial construction, but capable of
being trained to perform particular tasks.

Turing's unorganized machines were in fact very early

examples of randomly-connected, binary neural networks,
and he claimed that these were the simplest possible model
of the nervous system.
Wikipedia
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TM AND PHYSICAL (NATURAL)
COMPUTING
[Link]
1LxIEMC58&feature=endscreen (0.26 min) LEGO Turing machine

[Link] (3 min)
DNA Transcription and Protein Assembly

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 2012 TURING CELEBRATION

[Link]
[Link]
2012 The Alan Turing World

[Link]
CiE 2012 - How the World Computes
University of Cambridge18 June - 23 June, 2012:
[Link]

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AIBS/IACAP WORLD CONGRESS

2-6 June 2012 in Birmingham there will be a World

congress celebrating Turing centenary
I am, together with Raffaela Giovagnoli organizing a symposium on
Natural computing:
[Link]

and together with Judith Simon and a group of AI researchers a

symposium on: Social Computing - Social Cognition - Social
Networks and Multiagent Systems
[Link]

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 2012 TURING CELEBRATION
Mathematician Barry Cooper is one of the
world-leading figures in the computability theory
and President of Computability in Europe, also Turing
Centenary Advisory Committee president.

He has written on the occasion of Turing centenary in

both Nature and Communications of ACM:

[Link]
The incomputable reality

[Link]
machine/fulltext Turing's Titanic Machine?

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 CONCLUSION
“So Turing's approach is seminal, illuminating the connection between in-computability,
mathematics, and natural phenomena. It has been carried forward by James D. Murray
and others, and though things get a lot more complex than the examples tackled by
Turing, it is enough to make something more coherent from the confusion of impressions
and models.

All that the hypercomputability theorists are getting excited about is embodiment and
reframing of the standard model, with or without oracles. But the embodiment does
extend to the emergent halting set and possibly hierarchically beyond, taking us into a
world beyond basic algorithms (see Chaitin's recent take on creativity and biology.)
There is some elementary but not widely understood theory that glues the whole thing
together. As more and more people are coming to see, going back to Turing with the
eyes of a Turing will do wonders.”

Barry Cooper: Turing's Titanic Machine?

[Link]

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CONCLUSION

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we

can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
Turing , A.M. (1950) Computing machinery and intelligence, Mind LIX, 433-60.
[Link]

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