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Topic: Voting opens for Alan Turing as Third CoV Saint (Read 2212 times) |
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Fritz
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Re:Voting opens for Alan Turing as Third CoV Saint
« Reply #1 on: 2010-02-17 15:12:12 » |
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I had trouble with the suicide, but as I refreshed my notions; he was for all intends and purposes murdered by people of the times and I still feel being an atheist was as relevant as his sexual preference for the prosecution; I think Christendom and alter boys clearly indicate deviant sexual preference when a devout Christian is involved was okey back them. Plus as pointed out below he was out in the open with his gayness so no KGB blackmail would have made sense. I will again underscore that this is my take and some of it is based on feelings.
Cheers
Fritz
PS Thx for hosting this MO
SOURCE: HTTP://RELIGIONSETSPOLITICS.BLOGSPOT.COM/2009/09/ALAN-TURING-APOLOGIES-AND-CTHULHU.HTML
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2009
Alan Turing, Apologies, and Cthulhu
The British Government has finally apologized for its treatment of Alan Turing. Turing was one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century. He was responsible for founding computer science and he lead the effort to crack the Enigma encryption used by the Germans during World War II. This work saved many Allied lives and according to some historians proved crucial to the victory over the Axis forces. Without Turing's work, our world would look very different. However, Turing was gay. In 1952, Turing was convicted for engaging in homosexual acts. He was forced to undergo hormone therapy which lead to weight gain and other problems. Turing's security clearance was revoked. At the time, homosexuals were considered a security risk because of the potential of blackmail. The fact that the entire risk of blackmail was because they were considered a security risk apparently did not matter. Nor did it matter that since Turing was publicly gay, there was no possible risk of blackmail. Turing's ongoing consulting work with the government was terminated. Turing's life took a steady downhill side. In 1954, he committed suicide.
I am ambivalent about this apology. On the one hand, it is good to acknowledge how horribly Britain treated one of the saviors of civilization. On the other hand, apologies to the long dead always strike me as hollow. The living always face more than enough issues that are of far more practical importance than assuaging the feelings of the long-deceased.
Rather than discuss the pros and cons of such apologies, I am instead going to suggest three pieces of further reading.
First, Wikipedia has an excellent biography of Turing which explains his accomplishments and his mistreatment in far more detail than one can easily do in a short blog entry.
Second, Greg Egan, an excellent science fiction writer, has written ashort story imagining a world in which Turing's life went slightly differently. In this case, "slightly differently" means had the assistance of a time-traveling robot. The story is more serious than one might think from that summary. The story looks at Turing's interactions with C.S. Lewis. I'm not sure the story is completely fair to Lewis overall, but it is very well-written and is an amusing what-if. Like most of Egan's writing, there's just enough plausibly correct mathematics to make it interesting.
Third, Charles Stross has written an amusing novel The Atrocity Archives in which Turing figures in the background. The essential premise is that Turing did not commit suicide but was assassinated by the British government to cover up far scarier discoveries he made (so presumably the Brits still owe Turing an apology in that universe). In that novel, mathematics is deeply connected to magic and thinking about certain theorems can accidentally lead to summonings of Cthulhu and other eldritch horrors. Turing was killed for discovering a series of powerful theorems including a proof that P=NP which if invoked improperly could destroy our universe. Unlike the Egan story, this is not a story I can claim has much in the way of serious merit. But it is very fun. By most accounts, Turing was a man with a sense of humor about things. I'd like to think that he'd smile to know that fifty years after he was dead, Great Britain would be apologizing to him at the same time that people were reading novels which linked him to Lovecraftian horrors.
POSTED BY JOSHUA AT 5:19 PM
Source: http://talkingincircles.net/2008/12/24/alan-turing-on-religion/
Alan Turing on religion
By PROBABILITYZERO | December 24, 2008
ALAN TURING was the father of computer science, as well as an atheist and a homosexual (at a time when homosexuality was illegal and considered a mental illness). These two famous quotes are attributed to him:
“Science is a DIFFERENTIAL EQUATION. Religion is a BOUNDARY CONDITION.”
“I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, ‘And the sun stood still… and hasted not to go down about a whole day’ (Joshua x. 13) and ‘He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time’ (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.”
This entry was posted in ATHEISM, OTHER and tagged COMPUTER SCIENCE, QUOTES. ATHEISM, RELIGION. Bookmark the PERMALINK. POST A COMMENT or leave a trackback: TRACKBACK URL.
Turing's Historical Timeline
http://www.google.com/search?q=alan+turing&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&tbs=tl:1&tbo=u&ei=kz98S--kAZK1tgf93pm-BQ&sa=X&oi=timeline_result&ct=title&resnum=18&ved=0CDwQ5wIwEQ
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Source: BBC
<snip>In 1952, Turing was arrested and tried for homosexuality, then a criminal offence. To avoid prison, he accepted injections of oestrogen for a year, which were intended to neutralise his libido. In that era, homosexuals were considered a security risk as they were open to blackmail. Turing's security clearance was withdrawn, meaning he could no longer work for GCHQ, the post-war successor to Bletchley Park. He committed suicide on 7 June 1954.<snip>
Source: The Times
Author:Tim Teeman
Date: June 30, 2009
Gay Icons at the National Portrait Gallery
<snip>A playful momentum is maintained by Sir Ian McKellen (whose heroes include Edward Carpenter and Walt Whitman, both looking beardy and lusty) and by Ben Summerskill, the Stonewall lobby group chief, who writes wittily on Martina Navratilova and Joe Orton. Sir Chris Smith chooses Alan Turing, the code-breaker who committed suicide. In the last room Sarah Waters and Sandi Toksvig surf from k.d. lang to Denton Welch, to Peter Tatchell, in a mock-police mugshot with the badge “Queer Terrorist”.<snip>
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Turing The Biologist
Olaf Sporns, 06.23.09, 06:50 PM EDT
Another side of genius.
Most of us remember Alan Turing as a pioneer of computing and machine intelligence. However, one of Turing's most influential (and most cited) papers made a lasting contribution in a very different field of science, the area of theoretical biology.
Much of Turing's mathematical work focused on the formal description of the logical operations of human thought and the project to build intelligent machines that would embody the formal principles he discovered. Turing's contributions in this area will endure forever and he will always be regarded as one of the intellectual giants of artificial intelligence.
But there is another side to Turing's genius. Throughout his life, Turing was fascinated by the organized forms and shapes of biological organisms. How could something as simple as a fertilized egg grow to become something as complex as an adult organism? What are the physical forces that govern the appearance of organization in biological matter? How can physics and chemistry account for the shape of a growing embryo, the markings and pigmentation on an animal's skin, the branched structure of blood vessels or the rich symmetries of flower petals and leaves?
Turing observed patterns everywhere in the natural world. According to his biographer Andrew Hodges, Turing was especially attracted by the shapes and forms exhibited by plants, filling scrapbooks with pressed wildflowers he collected in the Cheshire countryside and puzzling about the appearance of sequences of Fibonacci numbers in fir cones. He also corresponded with a prominent neurobiologist, J.Z. Young, to learn more about the growth and plasticity of the brain. A theory began to form in his mind that would provide a quantitative framework for some of the most fundamental problems in biology.
His key idea was that morphogenesis came about by a pattern of "chemical waves," variations across space of chemical compounds that would serve to organize cells and tissue into biological shapes. In 1952, Turing published his theory in a landmark paper entitled "On the Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis." The paper originated a new approach to the mathematical theory of pattern formation, in biology and beyond.
Turing's insight into the origin of biological forms was all the more remarkable because it was achieved without ever having performed a single biological experiment, and long before the arrival of modern tools and model systems in development. Nevertheless, Turing provided an account of morphogenesis that required nothing more than chemistry and physics.The key idea was that a coupled system of as few as two chemicals (he referred to them as "morphogens") was sufficient to create stable patterns that resembled those seen in biological organisms, for example leaf whorls, pigmentation patterns on animal skin or the arrangement of appendages along the body axis.
A key factor in Turing's model was diffusion. The diffusion of morphogens was essential for setting up stable patterns across space. This may seem surprising since diffusion is generally thought of as a process that "evens out" deviations from homogeneity. Instead, in Turing's model, diffusion acted to create organized patterns out of an initially uniform medium. Turing showed that under specific conditions of chemical reaction and diffusion, the homogeneous distribution becomes dynamically unstable and a different stable pattern emerges.
Turing's work provided one of the very first models of biological self-organization. The ability of biological systems to organize themselves into greater and greater complexity appears, at first glance, to violate the second law of thermodynamics, which states that: Over time, the disorder or entropy of any closed system must increase. Nevertheless, many natural systems, in particular living organisms, manage to create order out of disorder. Turing's theory provided one of the first examples of how order could arise spontaneously.
Turing's theory was highly original. As was the case for his seminal contributions to computing and mathematical logic, his work on morphogenesis has few if any direct predecessors. Instead, Turing's 1952 paper represents a true singularity, the origin of an entirely new approach to the theoretical understanding of biological systems.
Turing dreamed of "building a brain," a machine that could replicate human thought and intelligence. Turing's dream has yet to become a reality. But he was the first to grasp and formulate some of main theoretical ideas that may make artificial intelligence a reality at some point in the future.
Today, many of us who still pursue Turing's dream see great promise in combining computation and self-organization in an attempt to capture and replicate the capacity of the dynamic networks of the brain to process, create and represent information.
Alan Turing was not to see the coming revolution in modern biology, or the advances of neuroscience in deciphering the workings of the brain. In my mind it is certain that, had he lived, we would now be much closer to understanding how intelligence emerges from patterns in brain and mind.
Back to the AI Report
Olaf Sporns is professor of psychology and cognitive science at Indiana University.
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Voting opens for Alan Turing as Third CoV Saint
« Reply #2 on: 2010-02-17 17:44:30 » |
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Hey there Fritz,
Thanks, and feel free to post whatever or discuss whatever re: Alan Turing. The actual vote, however, is for or against Alan Turing's sainthood, and should not be construed as any endorsement or rejection of whatever is said on this thread, or any other church doctrine other than his sainthood. That's my only point to make on this thread, so I'll get out of the way. Carry on.
-Mo
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Mo Enzyme
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Voting opens for Alan Turing as Third CoV Saint
« Reply #4 on: 2010-02-19 15:57:43 » |
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As of this posting, now eight people have voted with the following current equity results:
79.66% yes, 20.34% no.
Decisiveness 41.74%
Voted equity 70.37%
http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index.php?board=4;action=voteResults;idvote=95
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Mo Enzyme
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Voting opens for Alan Turing as Third CoV Saint
« Reply #5 on: 2010-02-20 14:06:34 » |
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As of this posting, no new votes - still eight
equity results somewhat altered due to further activity in Meridion:
76.97% yes, 23.03% no.
Decisiveness 38.05%
Voted equity 70.54%
PS. updated resuts today since the above previous results @ 13:06:34:
@ 13:31:48
9 votes:
82.14% yes, 17.86% no.
Decisiveness 58.45%
Voted equity 90.94%
http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index.php?board=4;action=voteResults;idvote=95
recent updates to Turing CoV wiki at http://www.churchofvirus.org/wiki/AlanTuring
This will be my last update for a few days. I personally advocate keeping the vote open for several more weeks (perhaps a month total from opening) so that anyone wishing to discuss, change votes, participate in the wiki, etc. can have sufficient opportunity to do so.
-Mo
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Mo Enzyme
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Re:Voting opens for Alan Turing as Third CoV Saint
« Reply #6 on: 2010-02-24 11:03:38 » |
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As of this posting, no new votes - still nine
equity results somewhat altered due to further activity in Meridion:
80.01% yes, 19.99% no.
Decisiveness 54.07%
Voted equity 90.11%
http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index.php?board=4;action=voteResults;idvote=95
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Voting opens for Alan Turing as Third CoV Saint
« Reply #7 on: 2010-03-04 13:02:12 » |
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As of this posting, no new votes - eight now plus one recorded abstention.
100% yes, 0% no.
Decisiveness 85.96%
Voted equity 91.72%
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Voting opens for Alan Turing as Third CoV Saint
« Reply #8 on: 2010-03-18 09:25:44 » |
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Sometime after this Saturday, March 20th, I will close this vote
http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index.php?board=4;action=voteResults;idvote=95
Assuming no major changes in the voting results, Alan Turing will then officially become our third Virian saint. At that time this wiki page will be made into a permanent webpage on the Church of Virus website - David Lucifer has agreed to perform this technical task. Until then, the wiki version is open for editing.
http://www.churchofvirus.org/wiki/AlanTuring
As of this posting, no new votes - eight now plus one recorded abstention.
100% yes, 0% no.
Decisiveness 88.66%
Voted equity 93.18%
Be sure to also vote on Alan Turing's reputation in the Meridion system, in addition to many other famous/infamous people. This vote will remain open indefinitely like all of our reputation votes.
http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index.php?board=4;action=rateIndex;category=person
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Voting opens for Alan Turing as Third CoV Saint
« Reply #9 on: 2010-03-21 09:47:45 » |
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As promised, I have now closed the Turing Sainthood vote, locking in the final results as follows:
final vote - eight plus one recorded abstention.
100% yes, 0% no.
Decisiveness 84.88%
Voted equity 91.84%
Lucifer has told me he will use our Turing wiki to make our permanent webpage.
Although the vote for Sainthood is closed you may still participate in the ongoing reputation vote for Alan Turing among other famous figures.
http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index.php?board=4;action=rateIndex;category=person
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Voting opens for Alan Turing as Third CoV Saint
« Reply #10 on: 2010-03-28 19:04:15 » |
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This thread is now locked.
redirect to Saint Alan Turing for any further comments.
-Mo
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I will fight your gods for food,
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