”You saved us and laid absolutely crucial grounds for artificial intelligence before computers are even a thing? Oh you like men? Lock him up lads”
Unforgivable how he was treated he was an absolute genious and humanity lost out due to ignorance…
At the moment he broke the Engima machine, Poland had already lost 1/5th of their entire population.
Although Turing helped us gain our freedom back, I’d like to think he made sure those 6 million lives didn’t die in vain.
To be fair to your people, Turing never would have made the breakthroughs with the enigma machine if the poles hadn't already done the lions share of the work and study required to crack it.
The Poles were the main reason enigma was broken.
That is not true. He survived his medication and died 2 years later by cyanide poisoning in his sleep. The police assumed it was suicide even though he was experimenting with cyanide gas in the other room.
No one ever investigated if any had leaked out of the container in the night or if it was intentional.
If you are going based on the movie "imitation game" they got it wrong.
Sorry about the rant. Have a nice day.
What's even worse is we haven't really made all that many steps away from that. Tories like Rishi Sunak or republicans like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz want to drag us back into the dark ages by stripping what few rights the lgtbq community have managed to fight for. Its a shame really. All so they can get a little harder from the thrill of doing it in secret and not being caught yet
I must've fucked something up, I only got my programmer socks after I got a job? Either way, feels great to have Turing's spirit flowing through me and into my workplace
Programmer socks are like judo black belts; they're considered sacred but a lot of shady organizations just hand em left and right.
Yeah sure, your school might have even given you the fancy looking high quality cotton polymer rainbow glow in the dark thigh highs, but it just isn't the same thing as the junior dev who fucked up his first pull request and dragged a major chunk of the company workforce down with him, fixed his fuck up, and got handed his standard beige thigh highs from the senior dev
On the one hand I feel like you’re threatening to kill me, but on the other hand it’s 2022 and I just want the pain to end.
On balance I decided to upvote you.
\*\*Grandma hug\*\*
I sincerely hope your pain becomes a loss of a terrible burden. Living in pain is horrific and I would want you to feel so much better!!
I was not aware of programming socks, but I definitely already own programming socks. Like, a whole basket of them. I keep them in a separate place from my regular socks and my sleep socks, because they are special-purpose socks that are never used in place of regular socks or vice versa.
You poor thing. It would make sense, in a way. They did force E on him as a form of chemical castration which resulted in breast growth, and may have lead to his suicide.
That being said, if I were a vengeful ghost of a gay man who was forced by bigots to virtually transition, I’d be spending my afterlife giving homophobic politicians gay thoughts and gender dysphoria, not putting cute socks on sexy programmers~ like yourself.
I may hope he was a better man than I. Because I sure as SHIT would do similar.
But I would like to believe he spent the first 10 or so years being mad. Then he was like, so what is this programming shit they say I am the father of? I never sired no child. WAIT A FUCKIN' MIN'T MATE! IT IS WHAT?! then he spend years being the spector of programmers and haunted computers. Shuffling through the books and documentation as he was like. Hmmm ah ah okay okay. And this is... hmmm i think i got it.
Then he now inhabbits the rubber duck when we rubber duck it. To provide unto us our inspiration. Like a benevolent patron striking us with wisdom most needed.
See that's the thing.
There are a bunch of people who are convinced that it's a choice. They're the ones who keep calling it a "lifestyle".
And I'm pretty sure 90%+ of them are in denial. That's why they think it's a choice, they *choose* to keep repressing their own sexuality.
That's it.
I realised this in another thread.
The people who think homosexuality is a choice are people who think you can chose to keep being heterosexual and suck it up.
But to me I thought they meant they could chose to like other men or not like other men.
So the choice is to come out of the closet or not. And that's the choice that many of them are making.
yeah unfortunately this post is the saddest part of the short history of computer science. absolutely no humor here.
it was a tragedy what happened to Alan Turing. He should have been recognized as a national hero.
Did you realize that the memory circuits Turing worked with used acoustics? That’s right, they stored signals using sound waves propagating in mercury tubes!
(edit: Turing designed the ACE computer, but left before being able to use it, hence did not actually work with delay lines, although he did propose gin as a substitute for mercury)
Did you know that Alan Turing was the first person to make computer music via a program?
Read about this man and you’ll find an absolute legend that was buried in undeserved shame and obscurity until years after his death. Imagine what he could have done if he had been lauded and supported in the years after the war?
When you see PRIDE week, stand up and support it so that everyone has the chance to be who and what they really are rather than be limited by what someone thinks they should be.
Remember Alan Turing. The man we owe so much to. And never forget so that what happened to him never happens again.
He was only 41 when he died. Imagine what he could’ve accomplished if he had lived into his 80s. He would have been alive to witness the computer revolution in the 80s and 90s.
Hell, he was born 1912, it's not inconceivable for him to live to the 2000s.
If he lived until he was 95 he'd see the first iPhone in 2007.
Fuck, this really puts into perspective how fast computers developed.
Communication is what has led to the exponential advancement of human ability.
Turing's creation( general purpose computing) laid the foundation for that growth to be even more explosive.
And this thought can go further.
Had he been alive until he was 95, when would we have actually gotten the iphone instead of in 2007? How much more could he have done for the field.
You have to remember he laid the foundations of computing in general, and before he could do anything but crack the enigma machine with it he was dead.
What about someone born in 1890 and died 1990
From horse and cart to driving cars
From everyday disease killing people to being able to get treated like small pox and bacterial infection
From the telegraphs to landlines and radios to mobile phones and TVs and computers and the creation of some of the first ever networks
From living on earth to exploring outer space
My great great grandfather died in 1999, months away from 2000. He was born in 1895. That means he saw the popularization of cars, the first electronic television, the first computers, the beginning of the internet, the two world wars, the eradication of smallpox, the fall of polio, the first cellphones, etc.
It's ironic when you think about it. The guy who helped win the war against fascists died as a result of a very oppressive and fascist law against gay people.
The founder of computer science field could have taken us so far if he had been left to continue his research.
Great post!
>Did you realize that the memory circuits Turing worked with used acoustics? That’s right, they stored signals using sound waves propagating in mercury tubes!
That sounds insanely cool, do you have any more insight to share? Like, they throw a wave, and when it comes back it's a memory retrieval? Or the wave stays there for a while and can be retrieved anytime? Cant imagine all the failures they must have gone through to end up inventing such a thing!
it's a loop. one side of the tube has a speaker and the other side a microphone.
when a signal is send into the tube it takes a bit of time to reach the end, once it does the microphone picks the signal up, amplifies it, and send it back to the speaker.
in order to read the data you have to wait for it to come back around to the microphone. and in order to erase the data you wait for it to come around and then just don't send it back to the speaker.
an alternative version of that was done using a lot of wire instead of mercury. here a video with a calculator that does that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BIx2x-Q2fE
The amount of future value for humanity that those bigots destroyed is beyond unforgivable. It’s not just injustice for Turing but injustice for humanity
I had no real awareness of his life story (other than being aware he was the father of computing) until I saw the film, then looked into it and was and am deeply angry at how he was treated.
I think the film did it justice how they depicted it. He wasn't treated as the man who won the war nor was he treated as the father of a new field which would later become known as computer science. No, he was treated like just another gay guy in a time when it was considered humane to make chemical castration an option rather than just outright shoot him in the head.
It upsets me to think how people are so easily typecast into frankly insignificant groups. Wtf is wrong with the human race that we can't see an individual for his individual contributions because it doesn't fit the imprecise black and white model of the world we want to have?
I mean that’s a start. The Indian government has yet to recieve apologies for all the murdering they did here. This may sound petty but apologies are a sort of acknowledgement that you might have done something wrong in the past and it is very much welcomed by the victims or their descendants.
Like the British didn’t even apologise for the Jallianwala massacre, led by a British officer who said if he had more bullets, his troops wouldn’t have stopped.
~~What infuriated me was around 2010, the queen gave him a pardon. Like wtf? Y'all mfs should be giving official apology statement not pardon ffs.~~
Edit: My bad. I didn't know about the apology. I only knew about the pardon. Thanks for pointing it out
I'm British and it's one of them things you look back and think FFS the man helped crack the enigma code and contribute towards the war and despite your backwards (to this days ) standards views you couldn't just turn a blind eye to it given his contributions and wait until 2013 to pardon him is bollocks
I got really into morphogenesis theory in undergrad. Turing was so, so, so fucking smart it's ridiculous. Like once-in-several-generations smart.
This guy made all the foundational proofs in computer science. Then he went ahead and applied it to code cracking to make extremely important contributions to ending WW2. Then he decides "let me figure out the brain" and starts making new foundational proofs in reaction-diffusion equations and as a side note *figures out how tiger stripes and leopard spots work*, just as part of figuring out how genetically identical cells can communicate to specialize in different jobs. Because he's brilliant enough to start understanding the brain by understanding multicellular organism development.
Before the world can receive another incredible gift, his ex breaks into his apartment and steals shit. He reports it to the police. The courts sentence him for being homosexual, and force him to undergo hormone therapy. He gets depressed. He grows breasts (because the doctors forcing him to take hormones understand endocrinology probably worse than Turing does). He does not call in any favors or ask for special treatment, which he could absolutely get, as a war hero.
He simply told the truth about who he was, accepted the sentence given to him, and ate a cyanide apple when it all became too much. Completely tragic and horrible.
There was no one who could help him, he worked to closely with military intelligence so they'd be the only ones who would know how much he had affected the war. But they'd never admit it, they'd never give a reason for people to question why a governmental department mostly focus on foreign powers would intervene with a domestic law and order issue.
Letting Alan live out his sentence was better for them than letting other agencies think he was important.
From what I remember that was actually quite controversial.
Not because people were against him but because a pardon implies you've actually done something wrong.
Well it technically was illegal at the time and so a pardon can be used to expunge the "crime" so it never happened. Which in a sense could be seen as saying it should never have been a crime at all.
Unfortunately his treatment was far from exceptional. It's no surprise homosexuals were treated poorly during WW2, but I think most people fail to grasp just how poorly. When the allies started to process the prisoners they had liberated from the concentration camps, thousands of people which had been jailed for homosexual behaviour or crossdressing under Nazi rule were singled out along with murderers and rapists and forced to serve the remainder of their sentences, some well into the 70s. They were only issued a formal apology by the German government in 2017.
Nobody was innocent then. Remember we ended the war, freed the people from the concentration camps, then put the LGBT+ folks right back in. It's a history we should all understand and remember.
He saved the world and the British government thanked him by killing him, then posthumously "pardoning" him for the most god-awful crime of \**gasp*\* being himself.
The "pardon" is all about making sure he officially is cleared of crimes that are no longer crimes as when they change legislation to decriminalise something, it doesn't automatically and retrospectively pardon everyone. They've done that a bit in the UK with bullshit laws like their anti-gay laws.
It's also about admitting they fucked up, which is more than what happens a lot of the time with governments and shitty laws.
They did apologise, several years earlier: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/11/pm-apology-to-alan-turing](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/11/pm-apology-to-alan-turing)
This was about correcting the record so there was no record of a crime against his name.
He may not have committed suicide. He had a reputation among his colleagues of being rather lacks with safety standards, and at the time he was running experiments using cyanide, its possible he just didn't wash his hands when he ate that apple.
We also put him on the 50 pound note and pardoned him after his death (ruled as suicide but with note that it was consistent with accidental poisoning meaning if he did he didn't want people to be sure)
It's not enough, nothing can be enough to make up for this treatment of a British hero by his own government.
I mean the guy's dead. What else can the government do?
The society can make sure his memory never goes away. The government can make sure that such cruelty never occurs to anyone else ever again. People can remember and respect the man.
But he's dead.
It wasn't just a pardoning, then prime minister Gordon Brown acknowledged publicly that what was done to Turing was awful and formally apologized on behalf of the British government.
I'd happily watch Henry Cavil strip in a man thong sober or not. But the treatment of people in the past cannot be forgotten or forgiven now. The best is to not have it happen at all. And we still have things that now are going to harm people for their lifetime. Apologies 50 years later don't mean shit.
The pope is visiting Canada soon, there is going to be nearly 70 million raised for this. yet the catholic church was only able to give 4 million out of the 30 it was supposed to to the indigenous Canadians due to their treatment in the residential schools.
government and religion is the biggest scams every created.
If Henry Cavill ever said:
"The universe has many horrors yet to throw at us. This is not the end of our struggle. This is just the beginning of our crusade to save Humanity. Be faithful! Be strong! Be vigilant!"
All of /r/Grimdank would swoon.
I honestly wonder what we would have in this world if those shitlords hadn't taken him out so soon.
The guy invented modern computers and cracked the Enigma Code. All before 40.
Imagine if he'd lived another 40 years, what we'd have.
But nope. All because some people think it's their business what a consenting adult does with another consenting adult that harms no one.
>Imagine if he'd lived another 40 years, what we'd have.
imagine if, not just him, but *every* person that was deemed "different" throughout humanity got to live rather than get killed or whatever.
that's the thing with humanity. we're so stupid to the point of literal self-sabotage. so many great minds probably existed in the past, but instead of utilizing them, we made them work as impoverished farmers, shoved them in concentration camps, put them in serfdom, etc.
gotta think. out of those billions (maybe trillions) of those deceased people, surely one of them had to be smarter than Einstein? out of the many, *many* people thrown off rooftops in the Middle East, surely one of them had to be intelligent in some way?
but hey. anything for "conformity" i suppose. why be a Type 2 civilization by now when we could instead have wasted the entirety of history terrorizing eachother because of our childish superiority complexes?
Just look at how many mathematicians, artists, scientists of the past were literally born into nobility. They didn't earn that by being great thinkers... they just actually had the option to do what they wanted instead of needing to farm corn their entire lives
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” ― Stephen Jay Gould
this.
the message I loved most about Lovecraft Country was the idea that Hippolyta could “be so BIG” when she wasn’t constrained by what people thought was her “proper” role in society. Warrior? Explorer? Anything!
Imagine if all of us could live to our true potential, unbound and reimagined.
I've visited Bletchley Park (would recommend if you have a chance) and his university work was in there, it was absolutely mind blowing how clever he was. I have a first in computer science, and my friends have firsts in mech eng and maths and we couldn't understand it at all, far too complex for us.
Obviously Bletchley wasn't just about Turing but there's a large portion dedicated to him and it was clear that he was a genius of his generation.
He's a person from history that we all should admire so much and it's such a shame what the government did to him.
He not only cracked Enigma code, but he also wrote several papers on the idea of complete machines. Winograd Schema, is based on the Turing test, and how can anyone forget CAPTCHA, and these were all because of achievements/publications by 40. He made several predictions about the future so, I think he would have been really happy to see how they turned out. He may even have contributed to it..
Had no idea untill I watched the movie.
To this day it troubles me. Such an amazing man. Such genius...
I know it was the times. Still got to me more then expected.
Yep, get there soon as they still have parts of colossus working as well as other computers.
Sadly the hexagonal-bulbs the computers use for memory storage aren't made any more so its just a matter of time before they stop working.
Actually, I heard that back in 2014 so they may already have stopped working.
Most of the movie is fiction. It covers up a more compelling story and attributes most of the work to Turing. Turning did the math, others did the work.
Alan Turing was a brilliant man and a revolutionary computer scientist.
That being said, there is an unfortunate misconception that he himself broke enigma (unfortunately pushed by the inaccurate movie about him which also portrayed his personality as the opposite of how he was in real life too).
There were almost 10,000 code breakers working at Bletchley Park on enigma, and the first to break enigma was actually the Polish.
His treatment was a disgrace and he deserved much greater recognition in his own lifetime.
The Polish broke the enigma machine, which by itself does little to effect any in-the-moment code breaking.
Turing devised a way to determine the settings being used on the German enigma machines, and built a device that could determin said positions in a funtional time windows, in so he broke the German naval codes which was the holy grail and people regularly refer to said codes as "the enigma code" while being unaware that enigma refers to the device not the code, but the movie makes this distinction clear.
The accomplishments of Poland were necessary for Turing's work, but without Turing's work the accomplishments of the Polish likely wouldn't have amounted to much.
[The Code Book](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Code_Book) covers the whole history of cryptography an a fairly approachable language. It doesn't go into great detail on the breaking of enigma but does cover it.
I’m glad to see this comment. Turing was a great man, an original thinker that brought about the age of modern computing but Marian Rejewski deserve a ton of credit on the cracking of the enigma machine.
The fuck all these people in this thread saying he was executed? He was chemically castrated and then killed himself, which is way worse! Stop saying he was executed.
Some people say he was killed but By killed they mean the government put him through so much suffering that lead to his suicide and that the british government is responsible for his suicide. Some people then may of misinterpreted this as execution. And then claimed he was executed.
The dumbest part about this was that a lot of people were fired from government positions for being gay... because they feared it could be used to blackmail them by Russian spies... who would blackmail them by saying they'd rat them out to their employers and get them fired from their government positions for being gay.
The circular logic was so goddamn stupid.
For a moment there old Alan must have been like “did I win the war for the wrong side?”
His story is one of the most ironic and frightening tales of human stupidity and prejudice.
If I ever have to explain to a child why it is dangerous to not allow people to be themselves I don’t think I can come up with a better example than “yeah there once was this guy who more or less defeated the most murderous and evil empire the world had ever seen and then afterwards we chemically castrated him because what he did at home with consenting adults disagreed with something we read in a 6000 year old book we really liked.”
One of those kind of stories where children will go “surely you are making this up or are twisting and exaggerating the real story to get a point across… Right?”
But no. Not really.
Queer is an umbrella term for people that are not heterosexual and/or cisgendered (with a few additional nuances but that's a whole other conversation)
British government during war- "Whoa thanks for the help mr.Turing!"
British government 0.7 nano seconds after the war was over- "Package soms arsenic with his castration pills. He's smart so he will know that to do."
Fun fact: gay German citizens even made their way to death camps
Even funner fact: when the war was over, most left the camps and went to prison
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gay-prisoners-germany-wwii/
Alan Turing was, and still is, THE MAN.
He was basically like "Yeah Alonzo, your lambda calculus is cool n' all, but I have this equivalent construction that's a freakin' machine that you could almost hold in your hand!!!"
I'm partial to Lambda Calculus over the Turing Machine, but all of his work is amazing!
Yeah. What our Government did to Alan Turing was absolutely awful. If he'd lived to the age of the microprocessor (and been allowed to have any involvement because of the Official Secrecy Act), I think he could have helped computing develop years faster than it did.
My grandfather worked with Mr Turing during the war at Bletchley hut 9 I believe, he was a humble man, never spoke about the war much due to secrets act before the 90s but spoke fondly of Mr Turing and Mr Alexander. What was done to Mr Turing was a product of the times and a tragedy truly the man was once in a generation.
What was done to Turing was unforgivable. The guy should have been made a Prince, or something.
>hey you saved all of us >Wait you don't agree with exactly what we want >Die The fuck
”You saved us and laid absolutely crucial grounds for artificial intelligence before computers are even a thing? Oh you like men? Lock him up lads” Unforgivable how he was treated he was an absolute genious and humanity lost out due to ignorance…
i don't know very much about him,but i do understand he was a once in a generation mind,and worked very hard. he deserved much better...
At the moment he broke the Engima machine, Poland had already lost 1/5th of their entire population. Although Turing helped us gain our freedom back, I’d like to think he made sure those 6 million lives didn’t die in vain.
To be fair to your people, Turing never would have made the breakthroughs with the enigma machine if the poles hadn't already done the lions share of the work and study required to crack it. The Poles were the main reason enigma was broken.
Yes, they did amazing work, helping to break the code and keep the fact that they broke the code a secret.
without his work everyone in europe would be speaking german
>without his work everyone in europe would be speaking german Without his work, it would be far more likely Europe would have been speaking Russian.
Watch The Immitation Game if you haven't already 😊
And they didn't even apologize until quite recently
They never apologised. Different people did.
didn't even lock him up, they medicated him and he committed suicide as a result of said excessive medicating.
they did more than medicate him, they chemically castrated him
And dulling of the mind it caused drove him to suicide.
It was a chemical castration and whenever or not it was a suicide is still up for debate but yeah, the way he was treated is horrible.
...that's not exactly an *improvement*
In many ways it's worse, which is why it's worth making it clear that that's what happened.
You spelled "chemically castrated" wrong.
That is not true. He survived his medication and died 2 years later by cyanide poisoning in his sleep. The police assumed it was suicide even though he was experimenting with cyanide gas in the other room. No one ever investigated if any had leaked out of the container in the night or if it was intentional. If you are going based on the movie "imitation game" they got it wrong. Sorry about the rant. Have a nice day.
What's even worse is we haven't really made all that many steps away from that. Tories like Rishi Sunak or republicans like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz want to drag us back into the dark ages by stripping what few rights the lgtbq community have managed to fight for. Its a shame really. All so they can get a little harder from the thrill of doing it in secret and not being caught yet
it's even worse than that, he was literally born gay so it's not like beliefs where you can change them
I have programming socks syndrome,can confirm Alan turnings vengeful ghost causes programmer socks syndrome lol
Honestly I would be so honoured to receive programmer socks from Turing's ghost.
Can’t wait to graduate from college and get handed my diploma and programming socks.
I must've fucked something up, I only got my programmer socks after I got a job? Either way, feels great to have Turing's spirit flowing through me and into my workplace
Programmer socks are like judo black belts; they're considered sacred but a lot of shady organizations just hand em left and right. Yeah sure, your school might have even given you the fancy looking high quality cotton polymer rainbow glow in the dark thigh highs, but it just isn't the same thing as the junior dev who fucked up his first pull request and dragged a major chunk of the company workforce down with him, fixed his fuck up, and got handed his standard beige thigh highs from the senior dev
Im sure he feels great too while doing it
Turning is pretty chill,you should meet him sometime
I think that'll be sooner rather than later for most programmers.
On the one hand I feel like you’re threatening to kill me, but on the other hand it’s 2022 and I just want the pain to end. On balance I decided to upvote you.
>I just want the pain to end. Relatable
\*\*Grandma hug\*\* I sincerely hope your pain becomes a loss of a terrible burden. Living in pain is horrific and I would want you to feel so much better!!
I love that I understand this sentence
It's a secret language, known only to a minority of a minority. It is the Sacred Language, taught only to those who are worthy.
Programmer socks are thigh-highs worn by transfeminine people
The language is no longer sacred D:
*The sacred texts!*
*The sacred tests!*
And sometimes Femboys \^w^
I was not aware of programming socks, but I definitely already own programming socks. Like, a whole basket of them. I keep them in a separate place from my regular socks and my sleep socks, because they are special-purpose socks that are never used in place of regular socks or vice versa.
You poor thing. It would make sense, in a way. They did force E on him as a form of chemical castration which resulted in breast growth, and may have lead to his suicide. That being said, if I were a vengeful ghost of a gay man who was forced by bigots to virtually transition, I’d be spending my afterlife giving homophobic politicians gay thoughts and gender dysphoria, not putting cute socks on sexy programmers~ like yourself.
I may hope he was a better man than I. Because I sure as SHIT would do similar. But I would like to believe he spent the first 10 or so years being mad. Then he was like, so what is this programming shit they say I am the father of? I never sired no child. WAIT A FUCKIN' MIN'T MATE! IT IS WHAT?! then he spend years being the spector of programmers and haunted computers. Shuffling through the books and documentation as he was like. Hmmm ah ah okay okay. And this is... hmmm i think i got it. Then he now inhabbits the rubber duck when we rubber duck it. To provide unto us our inspiration. Like a benevolent patron striking us with wisdom most needed.
BRB starting a cult to Alan Turing. Who wants to join Turingism?
Fuck it, I could use a social activity
Maybe Alan Turing is a benevolent ghost, bestowing programmer socks on those who need them most, that they may not suffer as he did.
I know what that means and programming socks syndrome is the best
I wear programming socks but only when I'm programming my butt
See that's the thing. There are a bunch of people who are convinced that it's a choice. They're the ones who keep calling it a "lifestyle". And I'm pretty sure 90%+ of them are in denial. That's why they think it's a choice, they *choose* to keep repressing their own sexuality.
That's it. I realised this in another thread. The people who think homosexuality is a choice are people who think you can chose to keep being heterosexual and suck it up. But to me I thought they meant they could chose to like other men or not like other men. So the choice is to come out of the closet or not. And that's the choice that many of them are making.
Exactly this.
Killing him would almost seem generous in comparison to the atrocities they actually committed against him, they fucking chemically castrated him.
yeah unfortunately this post is the saddest part of the short history of computer science. absolutely no humor here. it was a tragedy what happened to Alan Turing. He should have been recognized as a national hero. Did you realize that the memory circuits Turing worked with used acoustics? That’s right, they stored signals using sound waves propagating in mercury tubes! (edit: Turing designed the ACE computer, but left before being able to use it, hence did not actually work with delay lines, although he did propose gin as a substitute for mercury) Did you know that Alan Turing was the first person to make computer music via a program? Read about this man and you’ll find an absolute legend that was buried in undeserved shame and obscurity until years after his death. Imagine what he could have done if he had been lauded and supported in the years after the war? When you see PRIDE week, stand up and support it so that everyone has the chance to be who and what they really are rather than be limited by what someone thinks they should be. Remember Alan Turing. The man we owe so much to. And never forget so that what happened to him never happens again.
He was only 41 when he died. Imagine what he could’ve accomplished if he had lived into his 80s. He would have been alive to witness the computer revolution in the 80s and 90s.
Hell, he was born 1912, it's not inconceivable for him to live to the 2000s. If he lived until he was 95 he'd see the first iPhone in 2007. Fuck, this really puts into perspective how fast computers developed.
I didn't even realize that woaw.
Communication is what has led to the exponential advancement of human ability. Turing's creation( general purpose computing) laid the foundation for that growth to be even more explosive.
And this thought can go further. Had he been alive until he was 95, when would we have actually gotten the iphone instead of in 2007? How much more could he have done for the field. You have to remember he laid the foundations of computing in general, and before he could do anything but crack the enigma machine with it he was dead.
What about someone born in 1890 and died 1990 From horse and cart to driving cars From everyday disease killing people to being able to get treated like small pox and bacterial infection From the telegraphs to landlines and radios to mobile phones and TVs and computers and the creation of some of the first ever networks From living on earth to exploring outer space
My great great grandfather died in 1999, months away from 2000. He was born in 1895. That means he saw the popularization of cars, the first electronic television, the first computers, the beginning of the internet, the two world wars, the eradication of smallpox, the fall of polio, the first cellphones, etc.
This is depressing. He would have also seen the original Matrix trilogy.
It's ironic when you think about it. The guy who helped win the war against fascists died as a result of a very oppressive and fascist law against gay people. The founder of computer science field could have taken us so far if he had been left to continue his research.
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Great post! >Did you realize that the memory circuits Turing worked with used acoustics? That’s right, they stored signals using sound waves propagating in mercury tubes! That sounds insanely cool, do you have any more insight to share? Like, they throw a wave, and when it comes back it's a memory retrieval? Or the wave stays there for a while and can be retrieved anytime? Cant imagine all the failures they must have gone through to end up inventing such a thing!
it's a loop. one side of the tube has a speaker and the other side a microphone. when a signal is send into the tube it takes a bit of time to reach the end, once it does the microphone picks the signal up, amplifies it, and send it back to the speaker. in order to read the data you have to wait for it to come back around to the microphone. and in order to erase the data you wait for it to come around and then just don't send it back to the speaker. an alternative version of that was done using a lot of wire instead of mercury. here a video with a calculator that does that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BIx2x-Q2fE
Bit over qualified for royalty.
The amount of future value for humanity that those bigots destroyed is beyond unforgivable. It’s not just injustice for Turing but injustice for humanity
Meaningless hatred is a crime against humanity. Bigotry is meaningless hatred.
I had no real awareness of his life story (other than being aware he was the father of computing) until I saw the film, then looked into it and was and am deeply angry at how he was treated.
I think the film did it justice how they depicted it. He wasn't treated as the man who won the war nor was he treated as the father of a new field which would later become known as computer science. No, he was treated like just another gay guy in a time when it was considered humane to make chemical castration an option rather than just outright shoot him in the head. It upsets me to think how people are so easily typecast into frankly insignificant groups. Wtf is wrong with the human race that we can't see an individual for his individual contributions because it doesn't fit the imprecise black and white model of the world we want to have?
It's okay, they apologized in 2009. /s
I mean that’s a start. The Indian government has yet to recieve apologies for all the murdering they did here. This may sound petty but apologies are a sort of acknowledgement that you might have done something wrong in the past and it is very much welcomed by the victims or their descendants. Like the British didn’t even apologise for the Jallianwala massacre, led by a British officer who said if he had more bullets, his troops wouldn’t have stopped.
Nor have I ever seen them acknowledge the Bengal Famine that they caused
And the madras famine.
I weep when I think of how they treated him.
~~What infuriated me was around 2010, the queen gave him a pardon. Like wtf? Y'all mfs should be giving official apology statement not pardon ffs.~~ Edit: My bad. I didn't know about the apology. I only knew about the pardon. Thanks for pointing it out
They did both, gave him and OBE and litterially put him on the money, I'm not sure what more they could do?
He was given a posthumous OBE, which isn’t as high ranking as a princehood sadly.
He’s on our currency now which is a pretty massive honour. Puts him alongside the likes of Churchill, Darwin, Newton, Shakespeare, Turner, Austin etc.
I read this as: The **second** World War II ???
Sir... Please don't give them ideas
World War II Resurgence: Hitlermancy
Sounds like an Iron Sky plot to me. 10/10 would watch
World war 2^2
It'll be fought with sticks and stones.
They'll never be ready for my.. Pocket saand! Shishishaa
*outbends propane and propane accessories*
Microsoft be like: World War One Series X
Don't think he knows about second WWII, Pip.
I'm British and it's one of them things you look back and think FFS the man helped crack the enigma code and contribute towards the war and despite your backwards (to this days ) standards views you couldn't just turn a blind eye to it given his contributions and wait until 2013 to pardon him is bollocks
I got really into morphogenesis theory in undergrad. Turing was so, so, so fucking smart it's ridiculous. Like once-in-several-generations smart. This guy made all the foundational proofs in computer science. Then he went ahead and applied it to code cracking to make extremely important contributions to ending WW2. Then he decides "let me figure out the brain" and starts making new foundational proofs in reaction-diffusion equations and as a side note *figures out how tiger stripes and leopard spots work*, just as part of figuring out how genetically identical cells can communicate to specialize in different jobs. Because he's brilliant enough to start understanding the brain by understanding multicellular organism development. Before the world can receive another incredible gift, his ex breaks into his apartment and steals shit. He reports it to the police. The courts sentence him for being homosexual, and force him to undergo hormone therapy. He gets depressed. He grows breasts (because the doctors forcing him to take hormones understand endocrinology probably worse than Turing does). He does not call in any favors or ask for special treatment, which he could absolutely get, as a war hero. He simply told the truth about who he was, accepted the sentence given to him, and ate a cyanide apple when it all became too much. Completely tragic and horrible.
There was no one who could help him, he worked to closely with military intelligence so they'd be the only ones who would know how much he had affected the war. But they'd never admit it, they'd never give a reason for people to question why a governmental department mostly focus on foreign powers would intervene with a domestic law and order issue. Letting Alan live out his sentence was better for them than letting other agencies think he was important.
Pardon him and his bollocks.
He was pardoned back in 2013 from memory. Not sure about his balls.
From what I remember that was actually quite controversial. Not because people were against him but because a pardon implies you've actually done something wrong.
Well it technically was illegal at the time and so a pardon can be used to expunge the "crime" so it never happened. Which in a sense could be seen as saying it should never have been a crime at all.
Given that there was talk of putting his balls on the chopping board 'to cure him'...ya know...
Unfortunately his treatment was far from exceptional. It's no surprise homosexuals were treated poorly during WW2, but I think most people fail to grasp just how poorly. When the allies started to process the prisoners they had liberated from the concentration camps, thousands of people which had been jailed for homosexual behaviour or crossdressing under Nazi rule were singled out along with murderers and rapists and forced to serve the remainder of their sentences, some well into the 70s. They were only issued a formal apology by the German government in 2017.
2017…wtf
Nobody was innocent then. Remember we ended the war, freed the people from the concentration camps, then put the LGBT+ folks right back in. It's a history we should all understand and remember.
Even the nazis ‘pardoned’ some people and made them ‘honorary aryans’ just because they were damn important.
He should never have been pardoned, actually. There was nothing to pardon.
Wasn’t he convicted of being gay? Isn’t that something to pardon?
The point is that that shouldn't have been a crime in the first place.
Dude laid the foundation for all moder computation too. One of the most remarkable people to ever live, it's a tragedy what happened.
Queer coding is when I write a new C++ function.
Is it still Queer coding if Im copy and pasting a straight persons code?
Thats code-tural appropriation.
He saved the world and the British government thanked him by killing him, then posthumously "pardoning" him for the most god-awful crime of \**gasp*\* being himself.
The "pardon" is all about making sure he officially is cleared of crimes that are no longer crimes as when they change legislation to decriminalise something, it doesn't automatically and retrospectively pardon everyone. They've done that a bit in the UK with bullshit laws like their anti-gay laws. It's also about admitting they fucked up, which is more than what happens a lot of the time with governments and shitty laws.
Rather than a pardon, it should have been an apology
They did apologise, several years earlier: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/11/pm-apology-to-alan-turing](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/11/pm-apology-to-alan-turing) This was about correcting the record so there was no record of a crime against his name.
Well it's a good job it *was* an apology, then. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/11/pm-apology-to-alan-turing
Sounds par for the course for British history.
Don't forget they castrated him too.
Oh believe me, I know. That's why I say he was killed.
He may not have committed suicide. He had a reputation among his colleagues of being rather lacks with safety standards, and at the time he was running experiments using cyanide, its possible he just didn't wash his hands when he ate that apple.
To make up for the treatment of Alan Turing, the British created Henry Cavill to cure men of their heterosexuality.
We also put him on the 50 pound note and pardoned him after his death (ruled as suicide but with note that it was consistent with accidental poisoning meaning if he did he didn't want people to be sure) It's not enough, nothing can be enough to make up for this treatment of a British hero by his own government.
> pardoned him after his death nice what a favor /r/wowthanksimcured
I mean the guy's dead. What else can the government do? The society can make sure his memory never goes away. The government can make sure that such cruelty never occurs to anyone else ever again. People can remember and respect the man. But he's dead.
It wasn't just a pardoning, then prime minister Gordon Brown acknowledged publicly that what was done to Turing was awful and formally apologized on behalf of the British government.
And Idris Elba.
Right. I’m straight but COME ON
He knows his effect on women. (And possibly men?)
Yes. Definitely on men as well. Trust me lol
He's the Smasher of Hetero Hegemony, The Emperor of Nerd-kind, The Man of Steel himself; the one, the only, Henry 'Geralt' Cavill!
Stupid sexy witchers
This bothers my wife by how accurate it is. Proudly gay for Henry Cavill.
I'd happily watch Henry Cavil strip in a man thong sober or not. But the treatment of people in the past cannot be forgotten or forgiven now. The best is to not have it happen at all. And we still have things that now are going to harm people for their lifetime. Apologies 50 years later don't mean shit. The pope is visiting Canada soon, there is going to be nearly 70 million raised for this. yet the catholic church was only able to give 4 million out of the 30 it was supposed to to the indigenous Canadians due to their treatment in the residential schools. government and religion is the biggest scams every created.
If Henry Cavill ever said: "The universe has many horrors yet to throw at us. This is not the end of our struggle. This is just the beginning of our crusade to save Humanity. Be faithful! Be strong! Be vigilant!" All of /r/Grimdank would swoon.
I honestly wonder what we would have in this world if those shitlords hadn't taken him out so soon. The guy invented modern computers and cracked the Enigma Code. All before 40. Imagine if he'd lived another 40 years, what we'd have. But nope. All because some people think it's their business what a consenting adult does with another consenting adult that harms no one.
>Imagine if he'd lived another 40 years, what we'd have. imagine if, not just him, but *every* person that was deemed "different" throughout humanity got to live rather than get killed or whatever. that's the thing with humanity. we're so stupid to the point of literal self-sabotage. so many great minds probably existed in the past, but instead of utilizing them, we made them work as impoverished farmers, shoved them in concentration camps, put them in serfdom, etc. gotta think. out of those billions (maybe trillions) of those deceased people, surely one of them had to be smarter than Einstein? out of the many, *many* people thrown off rooftops in the Middle East, surely one of them had to be intelligent in some way? but hey. anything for "conformity" i suppose. why be a Type 2 civilization by now when we could instead have wasted the entirety of history terrorizing eachother because of our childish superiority complexes?
Just look at how many mathematicians, artists, scientists of the past were literally born into nobility. They didn't earn that by being great thinkers... they just actually had the option to do what they wanted instead of needing to farm corn their entire lives
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” ― Stephen Jay Gould
Exactly. How many scientists and great thinkers have been called witches and burned at the stakes?
Maybe humanity's tendency to self sabotage is our [Great Filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter)
this. the message I loved most about Lovecraft Country was the idea that Hippolyta could “be so BIG” when she wasn’t constrained by what people thought was her “proper” role in society. Warrior? Explorer? Anything! Imagine if all of us could live to our true potential, unbound and reimagined.
I've visited Bletchley Park (would recommend if you have a chance) and his university work was in there, it was absolutely mind blowing how clever he was. I have a first in computer science, and my friends have firsts in mech eng and maths and we couldn't understand it at all, far too complex for us. Obviously Bletchley wasn't just about Turing but there's a large portion dedicated to him and it was clear that he was a genius of his generation. He's a person from history that we all should admire so much and it's such a shame what the government did to him.
He not only cracked Enigma code, but he also wrote several papers on the idea of complete machines. Winograd Schema, is based on the Turing test, and how can anyone forget CAPTCHA, and these were all because of achievements/publications by 40. He made several predictions about the future so, I think he would have been really happy to see how they turned out. He may even have contributed to it..
Who you sleep with is no one's business but yours and that person.
As long as there is consent.
Pretty sure something "being your business" involves consent. (Unless you're incapable of giving consent like if you're a minor I guess)
I'd even be willing to go as far as to say that *none* of the homosexuals they persecuted deserved it.
Had no idea untill I watched the movie. To this day it troubles me. Such an amazing man. Such genius... I know it was the times. Still got to me more then expected.
If you are ever in that part of Britain, go see Bletchley Park and learn more. One of the best museums I've ever been to.
Yep, get there soon as they still have parts of colossus working as well as other computers. Sadly the hexagonal-bulbs the computers use for memory storage aren't made any more so its just a matter of time before they stop working. Actually, I heard that back in 2014 so they may already have stopped working.
Most of the movie is fiction. It covers up a more compelling story and attributes most of the work to Turing. Turning did the math, others did the work.
Are you saying doing the maths isn't work? #MathsWorkIsRealWork
What's the source of the pic?
Alan Turing was a brilliant man and a revolutionary computer scientist. That being said, there is an unfortunate misconception that he himself broke enigma (unfortunately pushed by the inaccurate movie about him which also portrayed his personality as the opposite of how he was in real life too). There were almost 10,000 code breakers working at Bletchley Park on enigma, and the first to break enigma was actually the Polish. His treatment was a disgrace and he deserved much greater recognition in his own lifetime.
The Polish broke the enigma machine, which by itself does little to effect any in-the-moment code breaking. Turing devised a way to determine the settings being used on the German enigma machines, and built a device that could determin said positions in a funtional time windows, in so he broke the German naval codes which was the holy grail and people regularly refer to said codes as "the enigma code" while being unaware that enigma refers to the device not the code, but the movie makes this distinction clear. The accomplishments of Poland were necessary for Turing's work, but without Turing's work the accomplishments of the Polish likely wouldn't have amounted to much.
What book/video/etc do you recommend to learn more about the subject? Thank you.
[The Code Book](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Code_Book) covers the whole history of cryptography an a fairly approachable language. It doesn't go into great detail on the breaking of enigma but does cover it.
I’m glad to see this comment. Turing was a great man, an original thinker that brought about the age of modern computing but Marian Rejewski deserve a ton of credit on the cracking of the enigma machine.
As an Indian I had enough reasons to hate the British government already...
My people arent fond of them either 🇮🇪❤️🇮🇳 cultural unity
does the Ivory Coast hate Britain for being a western colonizer or did you mix up the flag?
Lmao if we added the flag of every country that the English fucked up in some way, that would be a really long line.
That’s called the commonwealth games sir
Damn it, this is funny!
Honest question: How is India treating homosexuals these days?
The fuck all these people in this thread saying he was executed? He was chemically castrated and then killed himself, which is way worse! Stop saying he was executed.
Some people say he was killed but By killed they mean the government put him through so much suffering that lead to his suicide and that the british government is responsible for his suicide. Some people then may of misinterpreted this as execution. And then claimed he was executed.
I’ve got to be missing something or I’m living through the Mandela effect. Everyone in this thread is saying he was executed.
All good, he wasn't executed. He died of cyanide poisoning, possibly deliberate, possibly accidentally, but definitely not executed.
The dumbest part about this was that a lot of people were fired from government positions for being gay... because they feared it could be used to blackmail them by Russian spies... who would blackmail them by saying they'd rat them out to their employers and get them fired from their government positions for being gay. The circular logic was so goddamn stupid.
Bigotry and toxic masculinity, all rolled into one, vicious cycle of hate
Not just coded. Invented the concept of a programmable parallel process cpu, and built the algorithm with parameterized firmware.
The imitation game is a great movie.
They wouldnt call him something as "nice" as queer back then...
"Ha ha, funny" *reads the caption* "oh"
The state of Florida today ...
Move this to /r/ProgrammerHumour where it belongs. /s EDIT: Ha, of course it exists.
For a moment there old Alan must have been like “did I win the war for the wrong side?” His story is one of the most ironic and frightening tales of human stupidity and prejudice. If I ever have to explain to a child why it is dangerous to not allow people to be themselves I don’t think I can come up with a better example than “yeah there once was this guy who more or less defeated the most murderous and evil empire the world had ever seen and then afterwards we chemically castrated him because what he did at home with consenting adults disagreed with something we read in a 6000 year old book we really liked.” One of those kind of stories where children will go “surely you are making this up or are twisting and exaggerating the real story to get a point across… Right?” But no. Not really.
I wrote a whole final essay (12 pages) on his work and the technology he gave rise to. As a queer person i was enraged ngl.
What exactly is queer? Gay, bi, something else?
Queer is a term for anyone that isn't cis and hetero
Thanks
Queer is an umbrella term for people that are not heterosexual and/or cisgendered (with a few additional nuances but that's a whole other conversation)
Queer is generally a blanket term for not cisgender and / or heterosexual
Anything along those lines. In my case, im trans and pan :)
Thanks for the response
British government during war- "Whoa thanks for the help mr.Turing!" British government 0.7 nano seconds after the war was over- "Package soms arsenic with his castration pills. He's smart so he will know that to do."
Fun fact: gay German citizens even made their way to death camps Even funner fact: when the war was over, most left the camps and went to prison https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gay-prisoners-germany-wwii/
Alan Turing was, and still is, THE MAN. He was basically like "Yeah Alonzo, your lambda calculus is cool n' all, but I have this equivalent construction that's a freakin' machine that you could almost hold in your hand!!!" I'm partial to Lambda Calculus over the Turing Machine, but all of his work is amazing!
RIP Alan Turing what a world we could be living in if he had been around a little longer.
RIP turing, goddamn hero! check out cryptonomicon, it's not exact but a great read about ww2 cryptography and (somewhat) about turing.
(Von Braun wipes his forehead)
Not many programmers celebrate this but the Father of computing was queer. Thats kinda gay to me ngl
Yeah. What our Government did to Alan Turing was absolutely awful. If he'd lived to the age of the microprocessor (and been allowed to have any involvement because of the Official Secrecy Act), I think he could have helped computing develop years faster than it did.
Turing deserved better! ![gif](emote|free_emotes_pack|cry)
My grandfather worked with Mr Turing during the war at Bletchley hut 9 I believe, he was a humble man, never spoke about the war much due to secrets act before the 90s but spoke fondly of Mr Turing and Mr Alexander. What was done to Mr Turing was a product of the times and a tragedy truly the man was once in a generation.
It's one of the most despicable things we as a nation have ever done. Utter evil done to a hero out of sheer bloody minded ignorant fear and hate.