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Rolling for aye through Space and Time
It is Alan Turing's hundredth birthday. It has been for some hours now in the country where he was born, but I'm on Eastern Standard Time. I spent much of my week fighting with computers, but I like to think he wouldn't mind being blamed for there being anything there to fight with at all. Google certainly thinks so.
I have been writing about Alan on and off for years—e-mails, online, longer than it took for the poem to find its shape. (Morphogenesis. He was a shape-changer, only partly of his own will.) He ghosts in my dreams and I can lay no claim to him; he was a dead man for longer than his lifetime when I discovered him, first in the person of an actor I loved, slowly emerging into his own tight smile and his schoolboy's dark-parted hair and his voice that everyone agrees was difficult, that I will never hear for myself because neither of his radio talks was recorded: I didn't know him. (You can listen to some who did. "He was not your typical Achilles figure, not a warrior king this man." I can add Odysseus now to the scrim of stories it's hard not to see him through, but if he ever told his way home, it was long after, in another country of electrons and equations, the static spark of a screen.) He became important to me nonetheless. He seems to be important to a great many other people. He should be: and for all the reasons that are worth celebrating as well as the ones that still hurt. At this distance, the apple can't be separated from the cyanide. You take the dead as you find them, bitter and sweet.
And there was another occasion in the executive mess, when Alan was holding forth on the possibilities of a 'thinking machine'. His high-pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: 'No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.' The room was paralysed, while Alan nonchalantly continued to explain how he imagined feeding in facts on prices of commodities and stock, and asking the machine the question 'Do I buy or sell?' All afternoon the phone was ringing in his laboratory, with people asking who on earth it was.
—Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983)
Do something scientific this weekend. Do something transgressive. Enjoy strawberries and cream. Do something really new.
I have been writing about Alan on and off for years—e-mails, online, longer than it took for the poem to find its shape. (Morphogenesis. He was a shape-changer, only partly of his own will.) He ghosts in my dreams and I can lay no claim to him; he was a dead man for longer than his lifetime when I discovered him, first in the person of an actor I loved, slowly emerging into his own tight smile and his schoolboy's dark-parted hair and his voice that everyone agrees was difficult, that I will never hear for myself because neither of his radio talks was recorded: I didn't know him. (You can listen to some who did. "He was not your typical Achilles figure, not a warrior king this man." I can add Odysseus now to the scrim of stories it's hard not to see him through, but if he ever told his way home, it was long after, in another country of electrons and equations, the static spark of a screen.) He became important to me nonetheless. He seems to be important to a great many other people. He should be: and for all the reasons that are worth celebrating as well as the ones that still hurt. At this distance, the apple can't be separated from the cyanide. You take the dead as you find them, bitter and sweet.
And there was another occasion in the executive mess, when Alan was holding forth on the possibilities of a 'thinking machine'. His high-pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: 'No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.' The room was paralysed, while Alan nonchalantly continued to explain how he imagined feeding in facts on prices of commodities and stock, and asking the machine the question 'Do I buy or sell?' All afternoon the phone was ringing in his laboratory, with people asking who on earth it was.
—Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983)
Do something scientific this weekend. Do something transgressive. Enjoy strawberries and cream. Do something really new.
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I was just thinking of which lines to quote, to say "I like this," but I'm come to the conclusion it would be all of them, so I'll not.
Thank you for sharing the links. I wish you a happy Turing's birthday.
Do something scientific this weekend. Do something transgressive. Enjoy strawberries and cream. Do something really new.
Words to live by. I'll try. Do you also, please?
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Oh, yes. There were strawberries in the house when I woke up. I am thinking what to do about the science.
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I'm glad to hear it.
So far I've not managed much of anything. I'll see if I can find strawberries tomorrow.
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I have some lovely little red red native strawberries...
Nine
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You're welcome. There doesn't seem to be anything centenary going on in Boston, but I wanted to say something.
I have some lovely little red red native strawberries...
Perfect. It's the season. And you could watch the stars, as Alan did (and wrote about to Christopher) in 1929:
Anything like 'making a spectrograph' was far beyond the resources Alan enjoyed at Guildford, but he got hold of an old spherical glass lampshade, filled it with plaster of Paris, covered it with paper (which made him think about the nature of curved surfaces) and set out to mark in the constellations of fixed stars. Typically, he insisted on doing it from his own observation of the night sky, although it would more easily and accurately have been done from an atlas. He trained himself to wake at four o'clock in the morning so that he could mark in some stars not visible in the December evening sky, thus waking up his mother, who thought she had heard a burglar.
From their separate houses, they saw the same comet.
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From their separate houses, they saw the same comet.
Stitched forever on one thread of light. That's almost mythic. Beautiful.
Nine
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Thank you. And I trust you.
I should have guessed Jacobi would play Turing.
I wish I had seen him. I know people who did. There is a television version, but it was made almost ten years later and in any case restructures some of the story.
What a pity these talks weren't recorded!
I know! At least you can read the transcripts: "Can digital computers think?" and "Can automatic calculating machines be said to think?"
The imitation of a machine by a computer requires not only that we should have made the computer, but that we should have programmed it appropriately. The more complicated the machine to be imitated the more complicated must the programme be.
This may be perhaps be made clearer by an analogy. Suppose two men both wanted to write their autobiographies, and that one had had an eventful life, but very little had happened to the other. There would be two difficulties troubling the man with the more eventful life more seriously than the other. He would have to spend more on paper and he would have to take more trouble over thinking what to say. The supply of paper would not be likely to be a serious difficulty, unless for instance he were on a desert island, and in any case it could only be a technical or a financial problem. The other difficulty would be more fundamental and would become more serious still if he were not writing his life but a work on something he knew nothing about, let us say about family life on Mars. Our problem of programming a computer to behave like a brain is something like trying to write this treatise on a desert island. We cannot get the storage capacity we need: in other words we cannot get enough paper to write the treatise on, and in any case we don't know what to write down if we had it. This is a poor state of affairs, but, to continue the analogy, it is something to know how to write, and to appreciate the fact that most knowldge can be embodied in books.
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Oh, nice.
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No, actually I hadn't. His mother would have liked it.
(I am skeptical, because I do not know how important it is to the author for Turing not to be a suicide, because of whatever that seems to say about him; if death by misadventure lets society off the hook in a way that an unambiguous bite of cyanide wouldn't. But it's interesting that people are still looking at the story all these years later. Getting under the myth is important.)
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If it was an accident, I wonder whether Turing is currently laughing at everyone, or annoyed that his work was interrupted early.
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It makes sense as a mechanism that would have occurred to a computer scientist: on/off switches.
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You can read the paper online: "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" (1952).
I started reading David Quammen because he discussed the paper—along with slime mold—in an essay in his collection The Boilerplate Rhino (2001). I had never encountered anyone else who wanted to talk about Alan Turing and Dictyostelium discoideum. I went out and bought pretty much everything of his I could find.
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And Happy Hundredth Birthday to Mr. Turing!
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Of course! Thank you for asking.
And Happy Hundredth Birthday to Mr. Turing!
Amen!
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This.
I have fallen in love with many people who were long dead, and told their stories to learn to know them and see how their stories would change me. That wasn't a conscious decision at first, it's just easy to get fascinated with a fixed story and wonder about what it meant to the person whose story it was. For me, it's the paradigm of a one-way relationship, but with an odd sort-of time travel. It generally makes me think of Ghost by the Indigo Girls, which is about having that sort of relationship with Virginia Woolf.
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I don't know if falling in love is the right terminology (I really don't want to sleep with Wittgenstein; all issues of compatibility aside, I think I'd hurt myself), but I have been trying to keep track of my ghosts. I found a lot of them first through other people's fiction. John Adams, oddly, speaking of the upcoming holiday, was one of the first. Derek Jacobi's Claudius was another. I got better at research as I grew.
It's Virginia Woolf by the Indigo Girls, but Ghost also has that sentiment, just not directed to a famous historical personage. I get the impression that the ghost in Ghost is very much alive, just absent.
Yes. I have "Ghost"; I've never heard "Virginia Woolf." I'll look for it!
(The links are all dead by now, but I made a post a couple of years ago of songs about historical figures. I can send you any that look interesting.)
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Some of mine are Harry Houdini, Emma Lazarus, Rashi, Harry Chapin, Tallulah Bankhead, P.T. Barnum, Dorothy Parker, and Steve Goodman, roughly in order of discovery, and there are doubtless at least a few others, and I have no doubt there will be more as I read. To some degree every time I read a biography I meet a new person and notice them when they show up in other people's narratives.
The links are all dead by now, but I made a post a couple of years ago of songs about historical figures. I can send you any that look interesting.)
Thank you!
*makes a mental note to look at that when I'm not packing up a hotel room in Toronto*
Also, mine yidishe tante is excited to meet you someday. I just got off a boat with her about an hour ago. :)
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but if he ever told his way home, it was long after, in another country of electrons and equations,
That's lovely--and so's the story you quote from Alan Turing: The Enigma
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That's a good legacy.
That's lovely--and so's the story you quote from Alan Turing: The Enigma
It's a very good biography. Hugh Whitemore used it as the basis for Breaking the Code (1986), which I read first by about a dozen years: and fell very hard for. It just turned out I like Turing's life better than even an intelligent dramatization of it. (For starters, the real-life Joan Clarke was awesome.)
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I salute you.
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if he ever told his way home, it was long after, in another country of electrons and equations, the static spark of a screen
We don't have AI now because he left too soon, but there's a spacecraft about to land on Mars that can practically think for itself. That might have made him happy.
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Here, it's the heat that's wrecking everything.
Many processors did my bidding in parallel over the weekend.
That counts!
We don't have AI now because he left too soon, but there's a spacecraft about to land on Mars that can practically think for itself. That might have made him happy.
That counts, too. And I didn't know about it: thank you.