Slashback: Bots, Time Travel, Turing 340
That eerie, eerie theme music will get in your head all day. sideshow-voxx writes: "The BBC has announced that there will be more installments of the Audio Adventure Dr Who - Death Comes to Time available on the web in the New Year."
This is cool news (the accompanying art is a nice touch with this Dr. Who presentation), but it would be nice if they would put the episodes into more audio formats as well.
Things always seem to get more complicated. Eric Molitor, ("Linux hacker and Builder of Violator - Linux powered BattleBot that competed in May") wrote about the BattleBots vs. Battlebots story of the other day, saying:
"As a BattleBot competitor I was horrified when I noticed your article but here are some corrections... BattleBots INC != BattleBots the show.BattleBots INC is suing and not the TV show. (Comedy Central tapes the tournaments and airs portions of the finals on a TV show. But thats just like showing NFL games mostly. The TV company just pays a licensing fee to broadcast the event.)
Do a little research and the guy registered his domain at least a year after the first BattleBots competition in Long Beach. (Early 1998) In fact the battlebots.org domain was registered after BattleBots.com, and after BattleBots applied for their TM.
So this kid (running a script kiddie hosting service no less) registers a domain after somebody applies for the TM and then asks for $5K to give it up. Sounds like cyber-squatting to me. Also take a look at the dates on the website for the replies, etc. Things don't look right ....
Still BattleBots is dumb not to have registered the .org domain.
For a little history on BattleBots and the law suits, etc. that RobotWars got into that nearly destroyed this sport take a look at http://www.robotcombat.com/history.html.
Greg and Tray gave up a lot and everybody got together to dodge RobotWars/Profile records lawsuits to prevent the sport from happening. I'd hate to see them unfairly get a bad name."
Thanks, Eric.
Something to see in England. slathering wrote with news that the Alan Turing memorial written about in this Slashdot story has finally materialized. He writes: "I read about this in this months IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (who doesn't have a website). But I found the website for the memorial itself. Apparently funding was found for the Alan Turing Memorial since it was unveiled June 23, 2001 in Manchester, England. It was funded without any donations from the computing industry."
Turing (Score:2, Interesting)
Makes you wonder what would have come had he lived twice as long and had the more powerful technology to play with.
Re:Turing (Score:2)
The tragedy is compounded by the fact he was essentially persecuted and murdered for being a homosexual. It isn't like he burned out (e.g. Mozart) or brought about his own death through an inability to deal with reality (e.g. any of several dozen great musicians in the past half century). It also wasn't through a tragic accident. It was a deliberate act against a true war hero for being a member of a certain group.
Re:Turing (Score:2)
Mozart died only a short while after the first performance of the magic flute and was composing his requiem right up to his death. In fact his ability to compose was still so strong that a rival composer Salieri had actually commissioned the requiem, apparently with the intention of passing it off as his own.
Mozart's financial difficulties were not quite as dire as his wife later made them out to be. He certainly did not die from poverty, he simply had difficulty meeting the expenses of living in the style expected at court. At the time of his death the English court had decided to open negotiations with him to bring him to London as court composer so his money problems would have been shortly solved.
Re:Turing (Score:2)
Your entire knowledge of the controversy may come from the play, mine does not. A film does not have to be fiction, in the case of Amadeus nobody knows the facts for certain but the plot is certainly not a complete travesty as say The Patriot's invented massacre of civillians was.
The play only explores one theory of what Salierri was up to and by no means the most or least sinister. Before the play the most common allegation against Salierri was that he murdered Motzart with poison. Schaffer's play implies Salierri murdered him with overwork but even then there is a deliberate ambiguity.
Schaffer did not make up the comissioning of the requiem incident. The debate over what Salierri's motives were and whether he intended to kill or helped hill Motzart as he claimed long predates the play.
It is generally agreed that Salierri comissioned the Requiem but what his motives were is impossible to know for certain because his own statements on the matter came long after he went to the lunatic assylum. Salierri did claim to have killed Motzart, however it is difficult to know if that meant murder (which he did claim on occasion) or if he thought he killed him through overwork. It is not possible to take a madman's words at face value.
Re:Turing (Score:1, Troll)
I don't know. Turing's most famous accomplishment, the Turing Machine, is really a thought experiment that has very little to do with sitting down at a computer and hacking away at it.
Re:Turing (Score:1)
Re:Turing (Score:2)
design, preferring to do the base 36 data manipulation directly in his head.
Which is exactly what I was trying to say. Turing probably would not have benefited tremendously from better technology.
Re:Turing (Score:1)
Makes you wonder what would have come had he lived twice as long and had the more powerful technology to play with.
Aren't most 'original' contributions in science and math made by the young? It's a generalization, and you have people like Feynman who will break *any* mold, but ISTR hearing that many mathematicians consider themselves failures if they haven't changed the world by 35 or so... (well, the ones who were aiming that high anyway
Re: Alan Turing? (Score:3, Informative)
You should. Alan Turing is considered by some to be the father of modern Artificial Intelligence. A troubled soul whose contributions to the world included The Turing Test (to measure whether a program is artificially intelligent or not) and cracking the German Enigma cypher code during the war.http://www.math.sfu.ca/histmath/Europe/20thCen turyAD/Turing.html [math.sfu.ca] for more
info.
Re: Alan Turing? (Score:5, Informative)
More acurately he is the father of Computing Science and he developed the "turing machine" -- basically the simplest model of a machine necessary to compute anything that is computable. He also determined what is computable by a machine and what is not computable, e.g.the halting problem [v-wave.com]
Re: Alan Turing? (Score:1)
I just attended a lecture this afternoon by John Searle, where he devoted some time to talking about Turing. I got the impression that by developing the Turing Machine, Test, etc., Turing created the foundation for present-day functionalism in cog-sci. From what I understand, it sounds like the wet-dream cog-sci project is to simulate the "software" our brain runs on conventional hardware. And this AI project only makes sense insofar as the theory that humans themselves are essentially a sort of universal turing machine holds.
But I could be totally misunderstanding Searle =)
Re: Alan Turing? (Score:1)
I recently made a breakthrough in REAL AI (Score:1)
With the ability to have a 3d imagination, rules of what can be done and what can't, and basic language understanding which corresponds with its 3d mind... Then you have AI... Picture Zork, but when it says,"I don't understand the word X", for it to ask you, or use the context to guess the word.
I'm talking with some robotics professors at CMU and they really like what I have to say. Once I finish my talks there I'm probably going to get in touch with the guys from CYC and tell them maybe they want to add a 3d imagination so context can be formed.
Not only AI (Score:2, Informative)
A genius spanning several fields....
Regards
Treefrog.
Re: Alan Turing? (Score:1)
He's much more than that. He's as much the father of the modern digital computer as von Neumann. His mathematical theories laid the foundation for what's essentially all of computer science. The btinternet.com link above mentions the Universal Turing Machine, which models what is and is not computable by a machine. And as far as we know, there is nothing that can be computed that cannot be computed by the Universal Turing Machine.
The idea that the Universal Turing Machine models all that is computable by any machine is known as "Church's Thesis," and it is this thesis which represents one of the foundations of modern AI research.
But pretty much all of modern computability and complexity theory got its start with Turing.
Re: Alan Turing? (Score:1)
Re: Alan Turing? (Score:1)
Yes, the first one to actually break the Enigma was Rejewski, a Polish mathematician. (Source: "Seizing The Engima".)
Turing was one of many who worked at Bletchley Park and contributed to the Allied war effort through signal intelligence. He is worthy of our respect for numerous things, however, single handedly breaking the German encryption is not one of them...
Re: Alan Turing? (Score:1)
Re: Alan Turing? (Score:2)
Re: Alan Turing? (Score:2)
Battlebots.org (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Battlebots.org (Score:1)
Bringing the fact that the owner of battlebots.org is a script kiddie really has nothing to do with the issue at hand. He could be the worst human being in the world, but the fact is he still has the right to the domain.
Re: Dr. Who? (Score:3, Funny)
Doctor Who was a popular television show that ran in Belgium between 1972-1974. In it's day it was one of the most popular shows in Belgium and it starred Larry Lamb and John Craven (who went on to star in Hollywood movies such as Terminator and Total Recall).
No episodes exist of this classic TV show, but we can relive the episodes thanks to Steve Roberts who has reconstructed them from Crayon drawings and dialogue from episodes of Eldorado. The show was axed in 1974 after allegations that it was just a big hoax designed to extract money from the Belgium TV service. These allegations were denied by the production company, Grabitandrun.
There is another Doctor Who series as well, but by all accounts it was some obscure rubbish that is long since dead.
Doctor Who (Score:2, Interesting)
Well it certainly seems that Doctor Who is still popular. Not only is it being published on the web but the BBC releases an old episode on DVD every 3 months, has fequent VHS releases, comes up with two new novels every month and has licensed Big Finish [doctorwho.co.uk] to produce audio plays on CD in to the second half of this decade.
It's a wonder that with all this interest nobody is filming new episodes for TV.
Re:Doctor Who (Score:1)
Dr. Who on TV (Score:2)
turing test is flawed (Score:4, Informative)
One has to set different standards for different kinds of cognition, communication and interaction. An IRC user can sound like a computer if he or she is from another country and has a limited grasp of the language in which you and s/he are conversing, for instance.
A human can compete with a chess playing computer and his or her experience with computers may have been limited, so without further input that chess playing human may mistake this computer for another live person.
I think that artificial intelligence wpould be best measured with an understanding of emotion and ethics, so psychological and ethical examinations, such as those administered in Blade Runner.
Re:turing test is flawed (Score:1)
That, is not easy...
Re:turing test is flawed (Score:2)
If a computer is to act like a human, it must be fallible, have limited knowledge, and operate at a human's speed (or at least answer as if it were operating at such a speed).
So what you've done is destroy all the features of a computer that make it superior to a human (including speed and flawless recovery of data).
A more useful AI would be clearly a computer, as it's primary function would be to assist a human in doing the tasks a human is not equipped to do well.
Doug
Re:turing test is flawed (Score:2)
Um, fine. If you think those questions are important, then include them in your Turing Test. You're just making the test stronger, not weaker.
Ridiculous (Score:2)
I think that artificial intelligence wpould be best measured with an understanding of emotion and ethics, so psychological and ethical examinations, such as those administered in Blade Runner.
What do you think a Turing test is? In Blade Runner, they were not looking to see if someone had a proper sense of ethics... they were seeing if someone had *any* sense of ethics. Also, the idea of a human playing against a computer in chess and thinking it is another human is utterly silly (at this point) when you are talking outside the chess-game. Sure, the person might think they know the playing style of the computer, and therefore assign a human identity to it, but the instant a conversation comes up about stuff like "What'd you do yesterday" and "Why don't you live with your parents anymore" the cat would be out of the bag faster than you can blink.
For two (or something like that):
The whole point of the Turing test is that if a computer can fool a trained human in a double blind test reliably... it doesn't matter if they are naturally or artificially intelligent. Think about that. If you can't tell if it is human or not... does it matter whether it is actually human? Shouldn't you treat it as if it were human? This is a pragmatic approach (formal pragmatics, not pragmatics which is that same as "practicality"), but no less valid for that. If it looks like a duck, talks like a duck, walks like a duck...
Re:turing test is flawed (Score:2)
The point of the Loebner test (that yearly, gimmicky, Turing-inspired spectacle that purports to be engaging in a Turing test) is to fool humans. A number of people in the AI field consider the Loebner test a joke. It has as much to do with true AI, as Battlebots has to do with hard-core robotics. That isn't to say it's not fun, and that isn't to say some interesting ideas don't come out of it, but for the most part, it's the AI-equivilant of over-glorified RC cars, rather than the AI-equivilant of Mars rovers.
The point of the Turing test, on the other hand, is almost more of just a definition of intelligence. It's trying to describe a machine being capable of engaging in the type of dialogue that a human can engage in (which involves being able to learn new concepts, discuss philosophical issues, and so forth). It isn't trying to describe a machine that uses a few pre-programmed catch phrases and algorithms (such as Eliza's ever popular "swap first and second person and rephrase it as a question") to make people think it's aware.
Turing Tape? (Score:1)
Re:Turing Tape? (Score:1)
Actually, it would be neat to have it running with a single Moebius tape, and just see what happens.
Feed the output to the web, or something.
Dr Who Remix (Score:1, Informative)
I'm sure many of you are already familiar with them... but I'm not sure if electronic, house etc are that big in the US despite the fact the Roland 303 first hit the streets of Detroit and SF.
Re:Dr Who Remix (Score:1)
Jaysyn
Prejudice (Score:3, Insightful)
In the main, you can not change it. The smart ones survive it, the dumb ones commit suicide. That's the reality. A little love and understanding, and a little openness makes life more bearable.
Alan Turning was a brilliant mathematician, he was also a homosexual. Having a gender issue does not prevent you from making a serious contribution to society. On the other hand, the very same thing, like any other defect, gives one ample scope to master other skills to a much more worthy level.
And it's sad, that we take away from these great people the fruits of their work, and at the same time, make their life more miserable for what they are. Even if this makes them what they are.
Learn to love and cherish variety. It's what make the world go around.
Re:Prejudice (Score:1)
Now I'm all for variety -- but it seems that the world has been spinning on its axis perfectly well with generation after untold generation of hate, murder and other nasty behaviour.
Re:Prejudice (Score:2)
-= rei =-
P.S. - about Turing and the apple: the best theory I've read states that it was a well planned out suicide. After having been on hormones for a year, he had sunk into a strong depression, and steadily became more suicidal. However, he didn't want his mother thinking that he had killed himself. She had frequently warned him to wash his hands after handling dangerous chemicals. While there was far too much on the apple to be accidental, it was a method of death to which his mother insisted that he died accidentally, even though it was ruled a suicide.
Re:Prejudice (Score:1)
It's a plea for sanity and civility.
Re:Prejudice (Score:1)
You have any facts to back that statement up? Death statistics cross-referenced with high school grades/college grades/IQ test scores?
Re:Prejudice (Score:1)
The suicide rate among known gender people is five times the general population.
One reason posited for this was that these conditions makes people smarter anyway.
The other reason is that this represents the survivors after suicide on diagnosed and undiagnosed people have taken its toll.
Read this [transsexual.org] for more info.
Re:Prejudice (Score:2, Interesting)
From talking to some of them, I kind of drew up with my own hypothesis about this. Is it correct? Universal? I don't know.
While in High School they where outcasts. They didn't participate in regular school functions because they where constantly ridiculed. No football games and school dances. Most social clubs didn't want them.
With all of this free time and freedom from the standard "clique" mentality, they took refuge in books. They had a few close friends. They didn't really have casual acquaintances to waste their time. The friends they did have where REAL friends. A very close knit group where they could express themselves freely, unlike with the rest of the regular high school society.
When they moved on to college their lifestyle was accepted a little better. They had spent the last several years pretty much alone absorbing knowledge, and where ideally suited to excel at whatever path they chose to take.
I think this scenerio is true for quite a lot of homosexuals. Change homosexual to computer geek, and it still holds up pretty well, IMHO.
Re:Prejudice (Score:1)
Also, the sorts of homosexuals that you may have mixed with may be only the brighter ones who can cope with it revealed.
Homosexual sex does not produce pregnancy. (Score:1)
As a result, homosexual males in particular, are likely to have a larger number of sexual partners, and more opportunity to catch sexual deseases.
But AIDS is not a "politically correct" disease. It affects everyone.
Re:Homosexual sex does not produce pregnancy. (Score:1)
that, and, the little detail that for the most part anal sex is like having a blood transfusion with your partner. the risk of pregnancy is lower, yes, but i would think that homosexual males have larger incentive to be monogamous.
i know several lesbians and bi women. they don't seem too worried about AIDS, where as the gay/bi men i know are. AIDS seems to be less of a problem in the lesbian community than in the gay community, and the lesbians i know are _far_ more promiscuous than the gays (lucky girls...). I would be curious to see statistics corrolating the two, since it would seem that the primary vectors of AIDS are anal and vaginal intercourse, while oral sex doesn't seem to spread it as much. Please note all the opinion statements above, feel free to refute them with numbers or a reasoned argument.
i do agree with you, though, that a large portion of the population needs to be more civil towards alternative lifestyles (i often wonder who gets more crap, though, the extreme right-wing, or gays... i think falwellians are just too closed-up to get the kind of media attention other groups do. that, or the media has learned to filter them out)
(this is with regards to your previous comments in this thread... it's a bit OT, but i find it easier to reply to one post than multiple)
Please, i'm going to ask nicely, dogmatic statement of presupposed and preconcluded ideas or opinions as fact has no place in a "discussion" forum. in a discussion, you probably ought to at least touch on as many sides of the issue as you're comfortable mentioning. even though this is a touchy, personal issue, broad and direct statements are usually wrong, and i find them hard to listen to without a lot of doubt and uncertainty.
though some would argue that
anyway, i felt i should point out that you're not being totally "fair" here, as more of a friendly nudge than an accusation.
Oh well .... (Score:1)
Firstly, generalisations are based on norms. One can find individuals that disprove any particular norm.
Gender is laid out in a number of separate sliding scales, which eventually define, for example:
- Body shape
- mating preferences
- level of aggression
- gender identity, and
- desire to cross-dress.
None of these have any effect on one's general intelligence. One of them, (I don't know which), does show up, faintly, in the Myers Briggs Type indicator: 60% of males tend to be T types, and 60% of females, F types. They are all sliding scales, but in 89% of the population, they are all on the same side (either males or females).On top of the shape of the brain, there is the chemical soup called hormones, and also the inhibitions and restrictions that we impose through our education. Education and environment do not, as a rule change any predisposition, unless it was pretty marginal to start off with anyway.
Assuming that intellegence is not correlated, the increase in general intelligence of the gender dysphorics is due to their more often exercising the brain, and that those with poor coping abilities, regardless of intelligence, succumb to an early exit. Whatever the reason, the general intellegence level increases.
Being more tolerant on both sides makes life easier for all. But this does not stop the gender dysphoric from suffering internally generated stresses that might arise from doing something different.
As we see above, the mating preference is on its own slider. This means that homosexuals look and act pretty much like the normal heterosexuals.
But the comment I made about the spread of AIDS and sexual deseases through sexual contact applies to all people who are sexually active.
Still, I'd rather be shot down by the truth, than to live in ignorance.
Re:Homosexual sex does not produce pregnancy. (Score:1)
With that said, I believe that homosexuality is morally wrong. I do not try to force my views on others, but I get upset when the homosexuality community tries to force their views on me.
Now I will probably get modded down for saying something politically incorrect... oh well
Re:Homosexual sex does not produce pregnancy. (Score:2)
Under what rational system of morality could one's preference of partners for consensual sex be "morally wrong"?
Is it morally wrong for a man to be attracted to overweight women? To pregnant women? To female amputees? To midgets? You can find specialized pr0n for each of these fetishes.
I find some of these preferences a bit disturbing - but certainly not wrong. Just somewhat creepy. But people have creepy tastes in all sorts of matters - doesn't make them wrong, just means that I won't be joining them for an all day festival of pr0n featuring all 300+ pound people, or all guy-on-guy action. Neither is to my taste.
A human being can't control who they are attracted too, any more than then they could control their taste in food.
Can you imagine: "Gee, I like the taste of vanilla." "Sinner! Preferring vanilla over chocolate is morally wrong!"
Re:Homosexual sex does not produce pregnancy. (Score:1)
I believe that homosexuality is morally wrong. I do not try to force my views on others, but I get upset when the homosexuality community tries to force their views on me.
This statement confuses me. Have you met many homosexuals who force their views on you? How do they do this? "You must convert or we will kill this very cute puppy!" Most of the homosexual men (or women for that matter) I've known (not as many as it used to be since I got out of college and the restaurant industry) just want be left alone to live normal lives. Do they force their views on you when they demand the ability to get the same jobs as anyone equally qualified, and yet still be who they are? Should they all just slip quietly back in the closet and not bother you with their obvious wrongness? Living your life as what you are is not forceing your views on anyone else, it's just living. I may be wrong, maybe some gay guy really did threaten to kill a puppy if you didn't become gay, I don't know. Could you ellborate a bit more how "the homosexuality community tries to force their views on" you?
Re:Homosexual sex does not produce pregnancy. (Score:2)
Ok, then start thinking. Give us some of your moral philosophy. Give us your justification for condemning certain types of love.
And, if find you can't give one, have the intellectual honesty to re-examine your moral indignation and see if it rests on nothing more than a feeling of "ooh! gross!".
Nice try - but you're wrong, I'm afraid. (Score:1)
There is a fairly easy explanation of why reassignments work in lots of cases. One needs only consider magnetic hysteristus - a bar magnet can be polarised either way, and retain it. But if the field is too ingrained, no amount of magnetisation will change the field.
Homosexuality is not a concious decision, no more than heterosexuality is. What the issue here is is that the people who make this remark are trying to sweep the issue under the carpet, by saying "It's your fault", rather than consider the notion that it may really be an underlying biological cause.
Re:Bzzzzt (Score:1)
they just need some tender cult deprogramming
I have found people who say things like this really mean "Beaten and Tortured until they confess thier sins and repent"
Yes I am a Troll and this is Flamebait, moderate accordingly.
Re:Bzzzzt (Score:1)
Well in this case you really misunderstood me. :-)
Most folks want to be cared for a bit, and if they aren't getting affection from the opposite gender, then they could turn to their own for that.
On another note, I have heard doubts over whether Turing really did intentionally kill himself. He had been working with some deadly chemicals, and snacking on an apple while he worked probably wasn't the most clever thing to do ...
Re:Prejudice (Score:1)
What it does do is change one's attitude to sex, and some of the enjoyment of sex. It may in some cases alter the direction, if this is a marginal case. Otherwise, events after birth do not affect one.
Re:Prejudice (Score:1)
Wanted: an NT powered battlebot... (Score:4, Funny)
Somebody needs to build an NT powered battlebot, then we can have a serious NT vs Linux battle. (Of course the bastard will probably bluescreen as soon as the competition heats up...)
Re:Wanted: an NT powered battlebot... (Score:1)
But if the Linux battlebot infected the NT battlebot with a virus, could it be banned for using 'biological' weapons?
:)
Re:Wanted: an NT powered battlebot... (Score:2)
And it would have to be NT - if you used XP, everytime you changed the chain on the low-mounted chain saw, you'd have to call Microsoft for a new activation code. Think of all the activation reminders during an actual battle!
Bletcheley Park Needs Help Too... (Score:5, Informative)
Having visited Bletcheley Park for the first time last year, I highly recommend the trip. If you have any interest in WW2, code breaking, or the history of computing, it is a great place to visit. You can really feel the history as you walk past the huts where Turing and others worked. If you've read Cryptonomicon or The Code Book, it's even cooler.
I saw "Enigma" the movie...with Mick Jagger... (Score:2)
I saw the movie at Sundance last year (both Lorne & Mick as well as the director Michael Apted were there and answered questions afterwards) and while it wasn't a GREAT film by any means, I think it would definately be interesting to the slashdot crowd-- Kate Winslet was pretty awesome (she's good in everything though) and it had a cool "cloak and dagger" feel to it.
I'm not sure if the movie's out yet. I also can't remember Alan Turing being mentioned specifically, though there are lots of scenes of guys brainstorming trying to crack the code, plenty of BBC-esque twists and turns, and the film does a great job of explaining how the enigma machine actually operates. Just getting to see it how it was actually used in close-up is pretty cool.
I believe Mick Jagger actually had one of the few surviving enigmas which they used for the film. I also think Jagger has a cameo as an english general or something for about a 10th of a second, but it was so fast I coulda been wrong.
During the Q&A the actors said they got to meet many of the surviving members of the Bletcheley Park team, and some scientists tried to explain to them what they were saying in the film. They didn't understand it apparently, but had a lot of respect for those guys..
The best laugh was when during a somewhat technical discussion about the enigma machine and the various sea battle sequences, someone asked how historically accurate the film was and Lorne Michaels replied, "Well, the film was mostly accurate-- although in the actual war, the Germans lost."
W
Re:I saw "Enigma" the movie...with Mick Jagger... (Score:2, Informative)
Enigma the movie is based on Thomas Harris' book of the same name.
Tom Stoppard Wrote the screenplay for the movie.
Re:I saw "Enigma" the movie...with Mick Jagger... (Score:2)
W
Re:I saw "Enigma" the movie...with Mick Jagger... (Score:2)
It had it's premier a couple of weeks ago [bbc.co.uk] and goes on general release in the UK later this month.
Re:Bletcheley Park Needs Help Too... (Score:1)
That's a damn fine memorial (Score:1)
Re:That's a damn fine memorial (Score:2)
Irony of the Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine helping save Europe from the Nazi's and then being prodded and forced by politicians and doctors to take libido-surpressing drugs: people who's very asses you helped save, all because they're fucking prudes.
Fuckers.
Makes me recite the anticlericalist mantra: intolerance of the intolerant. In the words of Consolidated (from Play More Music), "Yes, we're hypocrites, but for the left."
"Breaking the Code" (Score:2)
Re:Irony of the Apple (Score:3, Informative)
-= rei =-
Re:Irony of the Apple (Score:2)
Actually, he took his life with cyanide. The apple is a symbol of that (apple seeds contain a very minute amount of cyanide).
Some payback... (Score:5, Informative)
If it was not for Turning, many of us would be speaking German. (And I have a bad enough time spelling as it is...)
And as payback he was hounded to the point where he commited suicide because the narrow-minded twits who were/are in charge of Britian thought that being a homosexual was a "security risk". (The only people who were overly concerned about it were the ones in the Government. You can't be blackmailed if no one cares.)
As Frank Zappa said "Drool Britiania".
And even more shameful is that NO ONE in the computer industry is willing to honor the man in a way where their name will be seen. Are they that concerned about the blue-noses and busy bodies? Must be. Not like they don't owe him for Computer Science as we know it today...
But they are not alone in the blame game. The ACM and IEEE should have been involved as well.
Too damn much attention is given to preasure groups now-a-days.
Suicide? (Score:2)
Since I don't live in a country that's covered by the Official Secrets Act [bbc.co.uk], I can say what should be pretty obvious: some brain-damaged James Bond type decided that having an openly gay scientist with a head full of Ultra-grade secrets just wouldn't do.
I have to throw in my favorite Turing story. During WW II, he was sent to the U.S. on a secret mission. He was told, "Don't take any documents with you." Of course, that meant technical documents, but he took it quite literally, and showed up in New York with no passport or personal ID of any kind. Must have been interesting.
I don't think the Turing rates sole credit for the Ultra Secret, or that the Ultra Secret was crucial to winning the war. But Turing certainly helped save thousands of lives.
Another Slashdot post calls him the "Father of Computer Science". That's going a bit far, but CompSci does owe him a lot. And he probably rates as the first computer geek.
Re:Suicide? (Score:3, Informative)
Turing is, if not the father of computer science, then at least one of them, and while he might have been a geek, it is his theoretical work that he is most remembered for.
His "halting problem" is as important a result as Gödel's incompletenes theorem and Russel's paradox. It puts a hard limit on the theoretical capabilities of computers that impacts most branches of computer science, e.g. any optimizing compiler is affected since the enabling analyses are necessarily limited.
The turing machine itself, as a model of computation, has become the standard measure in complexity theory.
The most prestigious award in computer science is the Turing Award (like for mathematics, there is no Nobel price
Turing gave us one of the foundations of modern computer science, and I'm sure his name will be remembered long after everybody have forgotten who Bill Gates was... so I don't think it is wrong
to call him a father of computer science.
/RS - theoretical computer scientist
Turing and other Fathers (Score:2)
And when I called him the first computer geek, I was claiming him as founder of a club to which I belong. I say this not just because of his many personal quirks, but because he was one of the first to recognize the importance of software. He had some interesting disagreements with von Neumann (another FoCS pretender) on this subject. Von Neumann thought that when you'd figured out the hardware, you had your system. Turing had the insight to see that this was just the beginning.
Re:Some payback... (Score:1)
Actually, assuming you're young enough that the 'many of us speaking German' would have applied while you were growing up, you could probably spell much better in German. Nearly all words are spelled phonetically in German, even a lot of words borrowed from other languages are respelled for German. And most of the words that break the rules for spelling follow a different set of rules (which a very few break). Compare to English where spelling rules are more of suggestions, especially with words borrowed from other languages.
Re:Some payback... (Score:1)
Actually, German spelling is much easier than English.
Re:Some payback... (Score:1)
Re:Some payback... (Score:2)
She worked with someone who was *very* openly gay. At one point, some officers who didn't like him decided they were going to get rid of him. He was put on trail, where they accused him of lying on his application for security clearence. He responded that, no, he didn't lie - he answered that, yes, he was gay. They checked, and sure enough, he had answered "yes", and had been approved anyways for unknown reasons. They just assumed that, if he had clearence, he had answered "no", and didn't even bother to check before bringing him to trial
-= rei =-
Re:Some payback... (Score:3, Informative)
You're kidding, right? The greatest award which a Computer Scientist can receive (since there isn't a Nobel Prize for computer science) is the A.M. Turing Award. Take a look at the list of past winners [acm.org] and you'll see all the great names (since the 60s, anyway).
DOCTOR WHO FOREVER (Score:1)
a real turing test... (Score:3, Funny)
Go and vote for the Doctor to return ! (Score:4, Informative)
(Text padding to get past the filter.)
Sport? (Score:1)
Re:Sport? (Score:2, Funny)
battlebots.org capitulates (Score:1)
Audio formats (Score:4, Informative)
If you have a Debian system, here's all you need to do:
root@localhost:~# apt-get install vsound
If you're on another system, you'll need to download the a href="http://www.zip.com.au/~erikd/vsound/vsound-0 .5.tar.gz">source and also make sure that you have sox [spies.com] installed. (vsound uses sox to convert the raw .au into wav format, which you can then compress however you'd like.)
Germans were beaten after Moscow 1941 (Score:5, Interesting)
In truth Germany was beaten after it failed to capture Moscow [wiesenthal.com] in fall 1941. The Germans were completely unprepared for a winter campaign, not even having adequate clothing for their soldiers let alone other supplies. After the failure to take Moscow, Hitler dismissed many of his top generals including the father of German armor Heinz Guderian [euronet.nl]. Perhaps his decision to order the army to stand fast in the face of a strong Soviet counterattack that winter saved the front from total collapse, but otherwise, Hitler in command was an endless series of catastrophes such as Stalingrad and Kursk.
The argument I suppose is that had Great Britain been strangled by the German U-boats than the Soviet Union would not have been supplied by Lend Lease. Lend Lease provided all sorts of supplies including I believe basically the entire truck force that gave the Red Army mobility in the counterattack. However, the facts are that by December 1941 the Germans were already in retreat, they were going to lose stupendous numbers of men in the winter because of unpreparedness, the Soviets had a tank the T-34 coming into mass production better than any tank the Germans could ever produce in mass quantities, and Hitler was in personal command. Even with no Great Britain, Germany after 1941 needed to learn how to fight a defensive war to force a stalemate, precisely the type of strategy Hitler would never have authorized. And in addition, the Germans would not have been able to complete an atomic bomb for many years. Sure they would have had V2s but the Soviets had the more battlefield effective Katyusha [swebase.com]. (Okay mass deployment was helped by those Lense Lease trucks.) Soviet technology was sufficient to counter Germany's, with the possible exception of rocket-powered fighters, a technology that Hitler delayed until it was too late due to his obsession with rocket bombers.
It is possible that a hundred years from now the real intelligence agency story of World War II will be how Joseph Stalin in his paranoid purges destroyed the finest network of spies ever assembled. Think of this, a time when Communism still had sway as an effective religion to produce loyal agents in any country. The United States for the past few decades has been continuously learning that one can't buy that type of loyal fanatic agent abroad, which is why the US is so dependent on high tech and American citizen agents, a combination totally incapable of predicting anything in hostile areas. Even though Stalin tried to order all his foreign agents back to the Soviet Union to be executed, there was still enough of a remnant such as the Red Orchestra [wiesenthal.com] to give Stalin a precise warning of when the Germans would attack. But Stalin had screwed things up so badly that the Soviets were caught totally unprepared. The initial catastrophe of the first few months when Soviet forces were repeatedly surrounded and annihilated was the only reason the Germans got as far as they did. Had Stalin followed through using the human intelligence network he had at his disposal, Germany would have been beaten years sooner, and perhaps all of continental Europe is occupied by the Red Army.
Re:Germans were beaten after Moscow 1941 (Score:4, Funny)
There are far, far, far too many things to list here, I've mentioned just a scant few. No one single event is directly responsible.
If you want to read a good book about the technical innovations behind WWII, I'd recommend "Secret Weapons of World War II" [amazon.com]. An excellent read, with a great deal of detail on the hundreds of small independant events (Maybe even coincidences) that shifted the balance ever so slightly in favour of the allies.
Torpedo Re:Germans were beaten after Moscow 1941 (Score:3, Interesting)
Overemphasis on new technology actually lengthened the war against Japan by 18 months. Read this [worldwarii.com] for one of many accounts of how the United States' dogged insistence on the efficacy of the magnetic detonation torpedo rendered the US submarine fleet impotent for 18 months, whereas after downgrading to earlier technology of contact detonation (and other fixes) the submarine fleet succeeded in sinking more than half of Japanese shipping, in effect imposing a total naval blockage. Note how scientific theory was perverted to reject empirical evidence from the submarine crews.
US intelligence had plenty of chances [acusd.edu] to have successfully warned the country of imminent Japanese attack. What saved the US was that the Japanese were so far below the US level of industrial capability and resources that even a perfect plan might not have been sufficient. The only Japanese hope was to have destroyed the oil storage tanks at Pearl Harbor in a follow-up attack. Ironically the Japanese own rigidity in their military thinking possibly influenced the commander of the fleet from pressing home the advantage, a pattern repeated when they failed at Leyte Gulf to seize the opening to attack the landing fleet.
All the futuristic technology and information isn't going to help if the leadership at the top is incapable or unwilling to determine what is of the most importance. Fortunately for the winning side in World War II the opposition had far less industrial capability and resources. And what won the war was more from the bottom-up as entire populations united and bottlenecks were solved in practical ways. As the war progressed it became easier for men of merit to get their jobs done. In such improved environments a million small improvements could work their way into the war effort, so yes there was some technical progress. But remember the Germans had V2 rockets and jet fighters and they still lost.
It seems to me the modern American large corporation is not facing a lack of technology problem, it's facing organization problems. The people at the top who are supposed to be setting direction for the company cannot or will not accurately access the reams of information at their disposal. In story after story I read about World War II, the solution to a problem turns out to be putting the competent man in charge and letting him use his expertise. Preconceptions, ideology, and prejudice driving policy are the enemy.
Re:Torpedo Re:Germans were beaten after Moscow 194 (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a good reason why navies were pushing magnetic detonation: contact detonation sucks. Modern (as in post 1905) warships and some merchant vessels are sectioned off into watertight bulkheads to improve survivability in the event of a hull breach. Most ships can suffer a breach of 30-50% of its watertight compartments before sinking!
A contact-detonated torpedo often only blows a hole in one or two compartments. Thus, you need to fire four or more torpedoes which are in very limited supply (about 18 per boat, with a 20minute reload time)
Magnetic detonators explode directly beneath the hull of a ship, breaking the keel of the target and causing massive flooding. When magnetic detonators were perfected, most any non-capital ship could be sunk with a single torpedo hit.
Re:Germans were beaten after Moscow 1941 (Score:2)
Their army was really only equipped for short, blitzkrieg-style wars - lots of fast tanks but nothing too heavy, lots of small and medium bombers but no really big ones, that sort of thing. This worked beautifully against Poland (smallish, pretty flat and the far side was sealed in by an ally) and France (not too massive and so despondent they basically sat by and watched the troops invade) but couldn't work against Russia.
Russia is massive, has very hard winters, and had demonstrated a willingness to pursue a scorched earth policy before when repelling Napoleon. OK, maybe their military wasn't massively strong in 1941 (though better than Hitler believed) but it didn't have to be. They could run back to the Urals - a heck of a distance - with no great difficulty, clearing the land of useful military and industrial resources as they went. The population then do partisan attacks in the conquered territory so that couldn't be left alone, the front grows to ridiculous lenghts - and winter will ultimately set in. At which point German troops were totally unprepared and unequipped so their tanks and guns were failing and their soup was freezing between the bowl and their mouth. Seriously. While the Russian troops lay in the snow all day then attacked. While the Russians threw convicts they regarded as expendable at the German lines first to wear out the troops, and while they seriously depleted their own population because they could and losing was unthinkable.
Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad all hindered Germany very substantially, but they couldn't have managed an invasion even without them. They had too much land to conquer, too much front to police, supply lines so long they had to build their own railways as they went then treat the railway cars as one-way disposable because they couldn't afford the time to unload and send them back. The army was trying to control most of Europe so was already overstretched, and was ill-designed for this campaign.
Moscow didn't help - and neither did the delay at the start which meant they weren't as far in when an early winter hit - but the Russian campaign was never one that could be won. It was short-sighted vanity all along, and the more you look at it the less the sums add up.
Sorge, Bagration Was Re:Germans were beaten ... (Score:2)
My argument is that people and organization are more important for intelligence work than technology.
Similarly consider Operation Bagration [army.mil], the destruction of the German Army Group Center in Summer 1944. Bagration I suppose is the Russian counterpart of the Allied deception campaign that mislead the Germans about the Normandy invasion. The "technology" that led to the success of Operation Bagration was the massive fleet of trucks the West had given Russia through Lend Lease, so perhaps some argument can be made that indirectly Enigma contributed to the victory. But what made Operation Bagration work was organization, attention to detail.
In my opinion, overemphasis on technology such as Enigma is dangerous in today's era because it reinforces current United States prejudices on how to conduct intelligence without "getting one's hands dirty". It would be a shame to repeat all the mistakes of the Germans and learn nothing from what worked for say the Russians.
Trademark holders are the squatters (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Trademark holders are the squatters (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Trademark holders are the squatters (Score:3, Insightful)
Although this implies other than corporate, government, educational institution, military, or network op's, the more specific idea of
Is it really squatting? (Score:2)
It seems to me that one major precondition for squatting to have occurred, is for the "legitimate" owner of the word to somehow be denied use of that word. But in this case, the Battlebots trademark owner seems to already have battlebots.com, no? So how could this possibly be squatting? The trademark owner already has the appropriate domain.
If they mysteriously and inscrutibly want to buy up other domains that happen to mention Battlebots without actually infringing on their trademark, then maybe they should be prepared to pay whatever the current holders' whimsical price happens to be. When a commercial entity already has their name withih .com, getting the same name within other TLDs is a luxury, not
a necessity or a serious attempt to defend trademark.
The do have a website... (Score:3, Informative)
The IEEE Annals of the History of Computing site [computer.org] is at http://www.computer.org/annals [computer.org].
Battle Bots (Score:3, Informative)
anybody who is looking for battlebots can find it.
Perhap I should get a class action suit against battlebots. I have yet to see a bot(automated device). I see lots of RC cars with saws and hammers smashing into each other, but no bots.
In fact they wouldn't allow me to enter an actual bot into there contest. Sad really.
Re:fp (Score:1)