sloth unleashed

arstechnica.com

June 23 marks the 100th birthday of Alan Turing. If I had to name five people whose personal efforts led to the defeat of Nazi Germany, the English mathematician would surely be on my list. Turing's genius played a key role in helping the Allies win the Battle of the Atlantic—a naval blockade against the Third Reich that depended for success on the cracking and re-cracking of Germany's Enigma cipher. That single espionage victory gave the United States control of the Atlantic shipping lanes, eventually setting the stage for the 1944 invasion of Normandy.

But even before this history-changing achievement, Turing laid the groundwork for the world we live in today by positing a "universal computing machine" in 1936. "It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence," he contended. His proposed device could read, write, remember, and erase symbols. It would produce the same results "independent of whether the instructions are executed by tennis balls or electrons," the historian George Dysonnotes, "and whether the memory is stored in semiconductors or on paper tape..."

www.nytimes.com

In the centenary year of his birth, Alan Turing, the British mathematician and cryptanalyst regarded as one of the central figures in the development of the computer and artificial intelligence, has been denied a formal pardon by the government of Prime Minister David Cameron for his conviction in 1952 on charges of homosexuality, then a criminal offense in Britain. An e-mail petition for a pardon for Mr. Turing, who committed suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple in 1954, when he was 41, has drawn worldwide support from scientists and others. But Tom McNally, a minister of state for justice, told the House of Lords that the Cameron government stood by the decision of previous governments not to grant a pardon for Mr. Turing’s conviction for gross indecency. Mr. McNally noted that the former prime minister, Gordon Brown, had issued “an unequivocal a posthumous apology” to Mr. Turing in 2009, but he said that Mr. Turing “would have known” that he was committing an offense under the law as it stood at the time.