Re:Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note
by pavelrub on Sunday September 01, 2019 @06:11PM
(#20855331)
> Without Bletchley Park and the massive advances in electromechanical computing that Turing helped to spearhead, the world would probably look very different today.
That's an unnecessary exaggeration. ULTRA was incredibly helpful to the Allies, but there is little reason to believe that without it the world "would probably look very different today". In all likelihood the worst scenario is that the war would've ended a bit later, and with somewhat more favourable conditions for the USSR in terms of their positions in Europe.
Re:Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note
by onei on Sunday September 01, 2019 @06:24PM
(#20855412)
If I recall, ULTRA played a non-trivial part in the Dunkirk landings by checking what the Nazis actually knew. Without that intelligence, it may not have succeeded and things could indeed look very different today.
Moving on from that, one of the people behind ULTRA went on to develop what we would recognise today as the cloud. In terms of cryptography, ULTRA was classified for decades after as the techniques developed were still in use.
It seems more like an acknowledgement that his past persecution shouldn't have any bearing on our perception of his myriad accomplishments. FTA:
>Alan Turing provided the theoretical underpinnings for the modern computer. While best known for his work devising code-breaking machines during WWII, Turing played a pivotal role in the development of early computers first at the National Physical Laboratory and later at the University of Manchester. He set the foundations for work on artificial intelligence by considering the question of whether machines could think.
I mean, we sometimes call general-purpose computers "Turing Machines", and we use "Turing Tests" to determine if an AI can demonstrate enough intelligence to pass as human.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test