-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 <http://www.investors.com/editorial/lands.asp?view=1> Today in Investor's Business Daily stock analysis and business news Leaders & Success No End To His Imagination BY KEN SPENCER BROWN INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Imagination should have no limits. And for Alan Turing, it didn't. By refusing to envision only what was strictly practical, he expanded the bounds of what was possible. Blending his command of mathematics with boundless imagination, he pioneered the notion of a thinking machine and paved the way for the computer age. By the time he died at age 42, Turing had become a renowned British mathematician, logician, cryptographer and war hero. Later, Turing's most advanced ideas became a foundation for computer science with the dawning of the digital age he'd envisioned. If things like software code, cryptography and artificial intelligence leave you scratching your head, just imagine wrestling with those concepts decades before the invention of the computer. Turing (1912-54) wasn't an outstanding student. But as a child, his focus was already keen, and he loved to experiment. In her 1959 biography of her son, "Alan M. Turing," Sara Turing recalled that some of Turing's grade-school inventions included a typewriter and a camera. His math skills quickly showed themselves, though the young Turing drew complaints from teachers for his messiness and penchant for neglecting the basics as he dived ahead into more advanced topics. As a house master put it in 1927, Turing was "trying to build a roof before he has laid the foundations." Actually, Turing figured that as he already understood basic concepts, it was little use wasting time on them when he could home in on more complex ideas. He was thinking beyond the educational system - and it would become key to his future breakthroughs. Early Inspiration Despite his shyness and occasional social awkwardness, friends knew Turing as an avid runner and rower, and fiercely loyal. Normally gentle in speech, Turing would defend his friends' views intensely when they were challenged. They often inspired him, too. The death of a close schoolmate in February 1930 sparked Turing's first published thoughts in metaphysics. In letters to the friend's mother, Turing pondered the connection between the human mind and the brain. These ideas sparked his thinking on artificial intelligence, which tries to model the human brain and the thought process. Turing failed to win a scholarship to his first-choice school, Trinity College, because of his erratic academic performance. But he didn't let that hold him back. Turing quickly made a name for himself at King's College in Cambridge, his second choice, on a math scholarship. He studied hard, striving to excel in each class. In 1935, at age 22, he received a fellowship there - a remarkable achievement for one so young. Still, he stayed his usual humble self. On his first night as a fellow, Turing's mother recalled that her son was happier that he'd beaten the school's provost at rummy, not that he was a fellow at 22. And though entitled to dine at the school's "high table," some complained that he seemed to prefer the company of other undergraduates. In her biography, Sara Turing says this was a sign her son simply didn't want to flaunt his new privileges. This isn't to say he held himself in low esteem. On the contrary, Turing was confident in his work, certain that he'd win academic prizes for several papers he submitted over the years. Invariably, he did. Even so, Turing insisted on giving others proper credit in collaborative projects, often downplaying his own contributions. This was one of many thoughtful traits that won Turing friends. On May 28, 1936, he submitted a paper titled "On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem." Designed to solve a 400-year-old logic problem, Turing described the functions of a machine that could solve any problem stated as a mathematical algorithm. Now known as a Turing machine, the theoretical device was the first to conceive of a general-use device that could store data and instructions and be programmed for lots of different math problems. Turing's attempts to build such a machine failed, but many of his ideas helped create the electronic computer. He wasn't living in a theoretical world, however; Turing searched for practical applications for his work. He put some of his ideas to use during World War II, when he helped crack secret codes used by the German air force. Turing's "bombe" machine sped up the decryption process through an electro-mechanical process of elimination. Cracking the Enigma codes used by the German navy proved tougher. But Turing loved a challenge. In 1936 - 11 years before the invention of the transistor and more than two decades before the integrated circuit - he envisioned his Turing machine as a mechanical device. This made it too slow for practical use. His exposure to the military's electronic calculators pulled his earlier ideas within reach. In 1946, Turing got the OK from England's National Physical Laboratory to create an electronic version of the Turing Machine, now dubbed the Automatic Computing Engine or ACE. It aimed to rival a planned U.S. system called the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer. As biographer Andrew Hodges notes in "Alan Turing: the Enigma," Turing's ACE was a radical break from the electronic calculators of the time. It could be set up for all sorts of calculations, making it far more useful than existing machines. "He had created something quite original and something all of his own," Hodges wrote. "He had invented the art of computer programming." The machine was never built, but Turing's ideas played a big role in other early computers, including one built in 1948 that proved his basic ideas. Yet Turing continued imagining what the still-crude technology could do. Ahead Of His Time In 1950, he published the seminal essay "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in the journal Mind. Here, he proposed the question "Can machines think?" He didn't believe there was an answer, but suggested that computers would someday be able to fool humans into believing they could think. He proposed what is now called the "Turing Test," an experiment to see whether people could tell human from machine in a typewritten chat. The test is still used today in artificial intelligence experiments. In the paper, Turing also was one of the first to suggest that computers would someday triumph over humans at chess. Again, he was way ahead of his time. A computer didn't beat a human until 1958, playing against a secretary who'd learned how to play the game only an hour before. Computers wouldn't become decent chess players until 1962, and wouldn't beat the best players in a regular game until 1997. That's when IBM's Deep Blue machine defeated champion Garry Kasparov. Despite his work in artificial intelligence, Turing was no robot. He had a deep concern for other people. When colleagues went through difficult periods, Turing helped them in their research to ease their schedule, or lent a sympathetic ear. Compassion, he believed, was as important as innovation. And technology, in Turing's eyes, was no substitute for humanity. - -- - ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 1336 iQA/AwUBQbsGecPxH8jf3ohaEQKAPgCdFGTYtszj39ZiduKm5xWk7RWB2YkAoJXF bj3bnlYXVovnri8SV5UA1PWf =bK0h -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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