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Marking 50 Years Since Alan Turing's Death 423

Posted by timothy from the actual-tragedy dept.
erroneous writes "Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Alan Turing: mathematician, code breaker, and computer pioneer. He was today commemorated in his home city of Manchester, UK." Here are stories at the BBC and at The Register.
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Marking 50 Years Since Alan Turing's Death More

Marking 50 Years Since Alan Turing's Death

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  • Forced to take hormones to cure his homosexuality.

    • Re:Killed by the society he saved. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Raven42rac ( 448205 ) * on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:31PM (#9361513)
      From Dailyrotten [dailyrotten.com]:
      June 7 1954 Despondent over court-ordered estrogen treatments to cure his homosexuality, Alan Turing commits suicide by consuming an apple laced with cyanide. Turing is considered the founder of modern computing, a pioneer in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and a crucial member of the team that cracked Germany's Enigma cipher in World War II.
      • Is it any coincidence that Apple Computers has a logo of an apple with only one bite in it?
      • Despondent over court-ordered estrogen treatments to cure his homosexuality

        I'm a little confused - what's the thought process behind this "treatment"?

        • Re:Killed by the society he saved. (Score:5, Informative)

          by RabidOverYou ( 596396 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:10PM (#9361719)
          At first, they gave (male) homosexuals testosterone. After all, they were "too girly", right? Well shit, that just turned them into raging aggressive horny homosexuals. So, since that didn't work, they thought "what the heck, let's do the opposite". They had no clue, but kept experimenting. Never seemed to cross their minds just to leave the poor guys alone.

          • Re:Killed by the society he saved. (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07, 2004 @10:58PM (#9362265)
            There are 2 things to consider here I think most people are missing. I'm not saying what happened made it right, but people seem to be lacking context. Frequently, we look back at things and say horrific, but we wouldn't be where we are today if those events in the past hadn't taken place. (I personally find it ridiculous to piss on Thomas Jefferson because he had slaves, Lincoln because he didn't believe blacks could ever be equal to whites, or Columbus for causing genocide simply because he "discovered" the Americas.)

            First, in historical context, I believe homosexuality was still considered a mental illness then. Nearly anyone in this time period with a mental disease was treated like trash.

            Second, medical practice back then was not as, say, scientific as our approach is today. Treatment and cure experimentation were the focus of the day, not understanding the underlying basis of disease (as noted, homosexuality as considered a mental illness back then).

            That said, his so-called treatment fell between medical science as well as societal/legal ramifications.

            This is also one of the reasons why it was a huge step to get homosexuality unlisted as a mental disease, something that that vast vast majority in the medical community, conservative or progressive, overwhelmingly agree with. (And also why the scientific and political community has always adjoined and butted heads nearly simultaneously.)

            • Re:Killed by the society he saved. (Score:5, Insightful)

              by FunkyRat ( 36011 ) * <.moc.liamg. .ta. .taryknuf.> on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @12:22AM (#9362785) Journal
              ...medical practice back then was not as, say, scientific as our approach is today.

              You think medical practice is any more scientific today than it was in the 1950s? Now, I'm not saying medical research isn't scientific, because it is (although the studies are often questionable due to the special interest groups funding them). It's just that medical practice is often as much voodoo as it was 50 years ago. Neither is clinical psychology any better. Mental illness is often culturally defined. Here in the U.S. in 2004 it just so happens that it's no longer socially acceptable to believe that homosexuality is a mental illness. Doesn't stop a whole lot of nutter Christian fundies from believing otherwise though.

        • It was supposed to kill libido. I think that it is actually effective at that.

          Of course, homosexuality isn't something to be "cured", but it was the 50's... not the most tolerant time.

          • Re:Killed by the society he saved. (Score:4, Informative)

            by MsGeek ( 162936 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:35PM (#9361843) Homepage Journal
            Depo-provera, a synthetic form of Progestin, is currently used for this purpose, and referred to as "chemical castration." It is also administered as a means of birth control for women. One of its side effects in women is lowered libido.

            • Re:Killed by the society he saved. (Score:3, Informative)

              by Anonymous Coward
              Lets not forget that it also has side effects like she can lose her hair, she is constantly depressed and she has her period for 3-4 weeks of every month (which they say is temp until she stops having her period altogether, but i never saw it.) There was a good portion of time there which I was pretty sure the way it prevented pregnancy was by making sure we NEVER had sex. Between the constant bleeding, the low libido, and her never "feeling sexy" thedrug was VERY effective at preventing pregnancy.

          • Re:Killed by the society he saved. (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Babbster ( 107076 ) <aaronbabb&gmail,com> on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:47PM (#9361913) Homepage
            Of course, homosexuality isn't something to be "cured", but it was the 50's... not the most tolerant time.

            It's too bad we still haven't come far enough, considering a leader of a democratic nation wants to amend the constitution in order to deny rights to the homosexual segment of the population. One has to wonder if President Bush would approve of forcing chemical castration on homosexuals today.

        • It was thought at the time that administration of estrogen would overcome 'problems' of gender identity (transsexuality) or homosexuality.

          This view is no longer widely held as far as I know. Google on estrogen homosexual and there are links discussing the whole issue.

          • Why on earth did you just try and mix up homosexuality and transsexuality? Completely different things - and transsexuality *is* treated with hormones (something most transsexuals are happy about).

            Homosexuality isn't a disease because homosexuals are already in the state that they want to be in (barring issues of societal acceptance). Homosexuality - attraction to the same sex - has no real barriers apart from societal ones. Transsexuals, however, are not in such a state. Consequently, it is a conditio
    • Forced to take hormones to cure his homosexuality.

      Yet another reason not to use "that's teh ghey" as a term of disparagement.

      (Not to mention it just sounds stupid.)

    • Re:Killed by the society he saved. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      cure should be in quotes, i daresay, since it isn't a sickness....

    • Unfortunately, that's the way we geeks get treated a lot of times.

      Too bad Turning didn't chose a different approach to dealing with ungrateful masses [azlyrics.com].

      GMD

  • It's quite a tragic story (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gay Nigger ( 676904 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:30PM (#9361498)
    I learned a lot about the theory that Alan Turing basically either laid the groundwork for or created wholesale himself in the course of my CS education. I'm in awe of his genius - truly this was a great man.

    However, I find it tragic and apalling that his life had to end the way it did. With the rampant homophobia in the UK at the time (and, some would say, such feeling still exists, albeit now driven underground), he had no choice but to end his life, else he would face a lifetime of torment and living in the shadows. It's really too bad that otherwise great nations do such stupid things and end up killing their greatest minds. Here's to you, Alan. *clink*

    • I got the impression from what I've read that it wasn't so much the British who hounded him to death as the American CIA who couldn't stomach the idea of a fag having access to their classified goodies.

      Oh, and BTW I'm an American.

      • Re:A bit different view (Score:4, Informative)

        by Eiki ( 713952 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @02:04AM (#9363272) Homepage
        Probably not. However, at the risk of being hounded to death myself as a Homophobe, and meaning no respect to the very great Turing or to any other homosexuals that suffered public disapproval or worse at this time, I suggest that the CIA would not have been entirely wrong in finding such a situation worrisome. It is now well known that the KGB emphasized recruitment of gays with sensitive knowledge, believing that they were consumed with bitterness toward their own cultures (and not without reason, either. Gays were treated even worse behind the Iron Curtain, but that was probably not known in the west at the time) and ready to defect. Indeed, 3 of the Cambridge ring were homo- or bi-sexual, as were many other burnt spies of the time. Denying security clearance to gays on such grounds was common enough for Clinton to issue an executive order banning the practice in 1995.

        Note: there is no evidence to indicate that Turing ever worked as an enemy spy, or that the CIA was involved in his death or was even worried about his loyalty. I am only suggesting that, in this case, the CIA would not have been acting out of pure bigotry, but out of a somewhat reasonable fear of exposure.

        • In general, intelligence agencies (be it KGB, CIA, Mossad, what have you) make note of anyone with sexual tastes not in the accepted mainstream, not just homosexuality, since this is something easy to exploit. It allows you to not only offer them something that is difficult for them to seek out on their own, but also to hold power over them by concealing it. At the time, homosexuality was far less publicly accepted than it is now, so it could be used as a pressure point. Understandably something like that c

  • Overestimating his contributions (Score:3, Insightful)

    by b0lt ( 729408 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:31PM (#9361511)
    On the BBC article:
    Without Turing's genius, you may not be reading this caption
    Isn't this overestimating his contributions a bit? I acknowledge that he DID further computer science a significant bit, but would computers not exist if he did not contribute? Deducting from parallel evolution, doubtful.

    • Re:Overestimating his contributions (Score:5, Interesting)

      by t_allardyce ( 48447 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:37PM (#9361543) Journal
      I think what they ment was without him, Hitler would be drinking tea at No.10, but he did have a pretty big impact.

      • Re:Overestimating his contributions (Score:5, Insightful)

        by RedWizzard ( 192002 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:34PM (#9361839)
        I think what they ment was without him, Hitler would be drinking tea at No.10, but he did have a pretty big impact.
        I know it's romantic to make Turing out to be the saviour of Britain, single-handedly winning the war against the Nazis, but it's not really realistic. I don't want to take anything away from Turing, who was a truly great man, but deifying him the way some around here are subtracts a lot from the achievements of the many other people who made significant contributions to the war effort. The fact is he wasn't the only genius at Bletchley, and if he hadn't been there they probably would have managed anyhow.

        • Timing (Score:3, Informative)

          by eniu!uine ( 317250 )
          Doubtless the people at Bletchley could have done many things without Turing.. eventually, but would they have done it in sufficient time? The intelligence game during WWII was a race against time and the information was important enough to lend credence to the argument that without Turing the war may have been lost.

    • In retrospect everything is inevitable.
    • Well the caption may have been there but I'd wager in german.
    • Without Turing's genius, I'd be reading this in German.

      I'd look really sexy in lederhosen...

    • Not really *but* (Score:5, Informative)

      by BlightThePower ( 663950 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:17PM (#9361764)
      whenever talk of WW2 codebreaking comes up, I do wish the Polish were more often given proper respect for their contribution, in particular the work of Marian Rejewski. He was the first to figure out the details of the commerical (class D) engima machine and was instrumental in constructing the first code breaking machines ('Bombas', hence the British and American use of the similar term, 'Bombes')

      Interestingly Rejewski made it first to France (where his work on Enigma continued) and then to Britain. Where his talents were wasted and he was apparently shocked after the war to learn what had gone on at Bletchley. After the war he went back to Poland and worked in a factory.

      It seems cryptanalysts often got the short end of the stick, alas.

      • Re:Not really *but* (Score:5, Informative)

        by connorbd ( 151811 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:50PM (#9361927) Homepage
        Yeah, they kinda did give Rejewski the shaft. In The Code Book by Simon Singh they tell his side of the story -- certainly Turing deserves all the credit he got, but the British shuffled him off into a minor codebreaking job nowhere near Bletchley.

        Highly recommended book, that. Lots of stuff, not just on Enigma and World War II, but a long way before and after, even including some interesting stuff on Champollion and Ventris (Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mycenaean Greek writing)... did you know RSA was invented independently in the UK but the discoverer couldn't talk about it until long after it had been reinvented in the US?

    • Re:Overestimating his contributions (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:27PM (#9361806)
      Science does not progress equally on all fronts. It goes in fits and spurts. It has been true in the past (perhaps moreso in the past) where the whimsy or intellect of a single person advanced a given field greatly, whereas if they personally were not involved the field might only advance a quarter of what it could, or be completely abandoned in favor of some more "fashionable" discovery. We are constantly finding diaries and notes of inventors and scientists who come accross an astounding discovery but since it isn't related directly to their research they disregard it to be rediscovered maybe 50 or 100 years later. I think it is entirely possible for things like this to happen.

      That being said, one of the major drivers FOR information technology was the sheer computation requires to advance in many OTHER fields, so computer science would probably have marched onwards.

  • Tony Sale (Score:5, Informative)

    by Richard_L_James ( 714854 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:33PM (#9361522)
    Tony Sale's webpage - WW II Codes and Ciphers [codesandciphers.org.uk] is well worth a visit also.

  • Turing Test (Score:5, Funny)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) * on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:34PM (#9361526) Homepage
    [l337_h4x0r] alan d00d r u 4 real?

    [aturing@thegreatbeyond.net] Yes.

    [l337_h4x0r] u r a b0t.

    [aturing@thegreatbeyond.net] Damnit, for the last time, I am not a bot!

  • A truly brilliant man (Score:5, Informative)

    by ErichTheWebGuy ( 745925 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:34PM (#9361530) Homepage
    Here is another interesting link:

    http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathemati cians/Turing.html [st-and.ac.uk]

    Not only did he (amongst others) crack the German Luftwaffe enigma codes, but those of the German navy, which were far more difficult. His work was pioneering on several fronts. Surely the world is a far better place for his having lived in it.

  • German Enigma (Score:5, Informative)

    by acceber ( 777067 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:34PM (#9361531)
    Here is a link for Alan Turing and his work on ciphering and enigma machines [codesandciphers.org.uk].

  • Turing test? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zorak Man ( 732141 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:34PM (#9361532)
    Turing test anyone? [aaai.org]

    • Re:Turing test? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:44PM (#9361585)
      You mean the Descartes Test?


      "For we can certainly conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words, and even utters words which correspond to bodily actions causing a change in its organs (e.g., if you touch it in one spot it asks what you want of it, if you touch it in another it cries out that you are hurting it, and so on). But it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as even the dullest of men can do." (Descartes Discourse on Method, from 1637)

  • While the turing machine is an amazing creation, I find the more recent work on Cellular Automata to be an interesting addition to the discoveries that worlfram made years ago.

    Cellular automata are desceptively simple rulesets that produce extremely complex patterns - through a rule that can be encoded into a 8 bit number, you can produce Turing machines, as well as chaotic patterns.

    To learn more about cellular automata, visit the MathWorld page [wolfram.com]

    • Re:Alan Turing's Machine in Cellular Automata (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nihilogos ( 87025 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @11:23PM (#9362444)
      Turing's 1936 paper "On Computable numbers, with an application to the entsheidungsproblem"
      was the seminal work on artificial intelligence and computation. Cellular automata are more an outgrowth of this work. They aren't even that different from Turing machines - they maintain a state and have rules for changing that state depending on their neighbours.

      And Wolfram certainly hasn't discovered much that's impressed anyone else working in the physics / computer science world.

      • Re:Alan Turing's Machine in Cellular Automata (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The problem isn't that Wolfram hasn't discovered anything impressive. The problem is that he doesn't acknowledge the work of others, and this borders on plagiarism. He writes a 1200 page supposedly scientific book without a "references" section! He almost makes it sound that he is the one who discovered cellular automata and he says outright that he is the first to notice that simple rules lead to complex behavior (this is not true: chaos theory existed before Wolfram came along). Finally, his "assistan

  • Turing's chess machine (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MonkeyBot ( 545313 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:37PM (#9361546)
    Maybe a bit off-topic, but Turing wrote the first chess machine [chessbase.com] on paper and played a well known player of his age. He always aimed to be a good player, but never quite got the hang of it. Guess we all have our own skills!

  • some thoughts... (Score:3, Informative)

    by vmircea ( 730382 ) <vmircea@tERDOSjhsst.edu minus math_god> on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:42PM (#9361572) Homepage
    If you care to read then feel free to look: here [turing.org.uk],the official biography if you don't know a lot about alan turing, just thought it would come in handy for some people. And, he definitely did make some decent contributions to our world. Who knows what our world would be like without him, some of his contributions to code / code breaking were very important, read the short biography on the site above, it can't hurt.

    • Re:some thoughts... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Pentagram ( 40862 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @10:37PM (#9362168) Homepage
      I think you understate his importance. He was far more than a code breaker.

      It is possible that he is the most important computer scientist of all time. He is of course against some strong competition, but in my opinion the only one in his league is Von Neumann. There is hardly a concept in computer science that was not at least considered in basic form by Turing.

      As for the war, the phrase "some decent contributions" doesn't do him justice. An argument can be made that he was the most important individual in WW2. That may be overstating it, but I would consider him to be one of the key persons. I think it is entirely possible that if you removed Turing from history, the Nazis could have ended up winning the war in Europe.

  • Didn't know he had a statue (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tony Hoyle ( 11698 ) <tmh@nodomain.org> on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:45PM (#9361589) Homepage
    I must wander down there some time... that it's of him holding the apple that killed him is rather thought provoking.

    However I can find an Alan Turing Road in Guildford but nothing in Manchester as the article implies.

  • Easily the greatest Mancurian of all time (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Right up there with Shaun Ryder and Ian Brown. And that guy from the Inspiral Carpets, whatsisface.
  • ...one of the labs was named after him; he was a student there back before he was famous. However, the weirdness is that it was a biology lab, not a computing or math lab. D'oh!

  • Re: Free Mal_Vu (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by stanwirth ( 621074 )

    Contrary to popular belief, mal_vu [attrition.org] didn't really pass a Turing test -- she would have had to fool real people as well as FBI agents.

  • 50/50 (Score:4, Funny)

    by fishbert42 ( 588754 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:58PM (#9361659)
    50 years since Turing's death... 50 hours since Reagan's death...

    Coincidence? Well, yeah, probably.

  • A Great Man (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Orinthe ( 680210 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:06PM (#9361699) Homepage
    I don't know how it is in more diverse places, but it often seems like I'm the only gay man majoring in Computer Science, and I remember years ago it was such a relief to find that arguably the most recognized name in the field was gay.

    Although the nature of his persecution and suicide are unfortunate, I'm somewhat glad of the fact that it's often talked about--things like this and worse are still happening in many parts of the world.

    That said, I prefer not to dwell on it. I am merely grateful that I and others have such a man to look up to in a field that so often seems at present to have so little diversity.

    Here's to Alan Turing, a Great Man.

    • Re:A Great Man (Score:5, Insightful)

      by andy55 ( 743992 ) * on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:39PM (#9361864) Homepage
      I am merely grateful that I and others have such a man to look up to in a field that so often seems at present to have so little diversity.

      Friend, you are mistaken. "This field" may have "little diversity" in its clothes, hairstyle, and fiction preferences, yes. But, in the arena in the mind, you are very mistaken. I've never seen some beautiful things--come in so many forms--from the minds of tech/CS/math people. It's just that, by mainstream's standards, many of their works and endeavors are dismissed over more glamorous and glittery things such as Britney Spears new video, crap prime time TV, a hot new sports car, a stylish outfit, or looking buf on the beach.

      IMHO, it's the artists, super-engineers, and super-scientists/academics who have the most diversity--it's just that, as you no doubt know, that diversity and pusle of life isn't seen with the eyes. It's seen with keen insight into their words, works, and actions. If the people you hang with are truely talented and driven but aren't "diverse" enough for you, then it's because you don't really know them.

      • Re:A Great Man (Score:3, Insightful)

        by hikerhat ( 678157 )
        Diversity means a mix of people from different privilege levels in society. Engineers are from the most privileged class in the world - middle and upper class straight white males. To suggest there is diversity because some people think slightly differently than others in this field is to ignore the problem, shirk responsibility, and contribute to the continued oppression of non-straight non-white non-male people.

    • Re:A Great Man (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Rorschach1 ( 174480 )
      Turing's always been something of a hero to me, too.

      You might be surprised... I'm not sure about CS students in general, but the hacker subculture at least has more than its share of non-heterosexuals. Of course, gay nerds being generally as socially inept and introverted as straight nerds, that's not likely to do you much good. =]

  • And remember! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Stormie ( 708 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:09PM (#9361709) Homepage
    ..there's no umlaut in Türing!

  • Buried his money, forgot where it was (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:11PM (#9361731)
    Turing buried [turing.org.uk] some silver bars for safekeeping during the war, but forgot where he buried them.
  • For spanish speakers, take a look at

    site1 [www-etsi2.ugr.es]
    site2 [wikipedia.org]

    Btw, how many programs try to hack the turing machine? :-D
  • ...as we know them today. Turing believed that machines could be created that would mimic the processes of the human brain. He acknowledged the difficulty people would have accepting a machine to rival their own intelligence, a problem that still plagues artificial intelligence today.

    He likened new technology devices such as cameras and microphones to parts of the human body and his views often landed him in heated debates with other scientists.

    Turing believed an intelligent machine could be created by following the blueprints of the human brain. He wrote a paper in 1950 describing what is now known as the Turing Test.

    The test consisted of a person asking questions via keyboard to both a person and an intelligent machine. He believed that if computer's answers could not be distinguished from those of the person after a reasonable amount of time, the machine was somewhat intelligent. This test has become a standard measure of the artificial intelligence community.

    • Re:Turing's AI studies probably created computers. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Geek of Tech ( 678002 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @10:09PM (#9362030) Homepage Journal
      As brilliant as he was, I don't get why Turing thought that mimicking the human brain would be a step toward intelligence. Sometimes I think the best way for a computer to prove intelligence would to not act like humans....
    • I work in intelligent robotics. The turing test is nonsense. It tests if you can create a electronic clone of the current human answerer, not 'intelligence'.

      Consider this, a human 4 year is intelligent by most people's measures. However, if you were to replace me with a 4 year old in a turing test, it would be obviously not myself and thus, not 'intelligent'.

      Similarly, if the turing test was conducted in chinese, and you asked me to fill in the part of the computer, I would also fail it.

  • Homage (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NitsujTPU ( 19263 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:36PM (#9361851)
    I just wanted to post in homage to the guy. I have difficulty calling anyone my hero, but if I did put people in such a position, Alan would be there.

    It's terrible that the world saw more value in vilifying him as a homosexual than eulogizing him as a genious.

  • Didn't he invent... (Score:3, Funny)

    by KC7GR ( 473279 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @10:11PM (#9362042) Homepage Journal
    ...the Turist Trap?

  • Here's to you, Alan Turing. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Grendel Drago ( 41496 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:37AM (#9363164) Homepage
    I remember learning about his life and death some years ago, when I was new to the field, just starting school. How many geniuses died early or tragically? Niels Henrik Abel, Oliver Heaviside, Srinivasa Ramanujan...

    What enraged me even more than the injustice of it all, the stupid, pointless unfairness, was the fact that he was well in the middle of his most productive years. Who knows what he would have come up with if he hadn't been hounded to death?

    It is as if Isaac Newton had been struck down in the middle of his life---how much would physics have lost? How dare they! I believe that we shall not see his like again.

    By Turing's death, we are all diminished.

    --grendel drago

  • Loebner Prize is Turing test instantiated (Score:4, Informative)

    by wombatmobile ( 623057 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:54AM (#9363239)

    "In 1990 Hugh Loebner agreed with The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies to underwrite a contest designed to implement the Turing Test. Dr. Loebner pledged a Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's. Each year an annual prize of $2000 and a bronze medal is awarded to the most human computer. The winner of the annual contest is the best entry relative to other entries that year, irrespective of how good it is in an absolute sense."

    Further information on the development of the Loebner Prize and the reasons for its existence is available at Loebner's web site [loebner.net].

  • Turing, Godel, Einstein, what a time! (Score:3, Informative)

    by 12357bd ( 686909 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @02:53AM (#9363401)

    Turing's time was fantastic, just imagine two 'monsters' like Turing and Godel working toghether!
    ie) Turing liked to view 'intelligent' systems as complex formal systems, when asked about how 'free' or 'creative' behaviour could emerge from a formal system, he simply stated than error conditions on physical objects are also inavoidable, so although formal systems are of course deterministic, no real implementation can be said to be free of defects, and so it cannot be said to be fully deterministic..

    What's in a sig?

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