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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (262660)	11/30/2005 8:28:06 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573898

"Who was Alan Turing?" Brit. Not only was he an ace cryptographer during WWII, he was instrumental in defining the tools we still use for formal algorithm development in computer science. There is the Turing Machine, which is a universal computer. It is the basis of the claim that any computer can do what any other computer can if time isn't a factor. So there isn't any inherent capabilities that using trinary or quantum computers have that can't be done now, albeit possibly slower. There is also the Turing Test, which was part of his work on artificial intelligence. All of this was done in the days when the total number of computers and quasi-computers could be counted by a human. In other words, he was seminal in establishing the theoretical basis of Computer Science before there really were any computers. Babbage's Differential Engine preceded him, but that is about the only development in computers that did. What von Neuman, who defined what we think of as a computer, is to hardware, Turing is to software. In as much as Computer Science is an actual science, a direction it has made significant strides in the past couple of decades, it credits Turing and later Donald Knuth as the reason. And Knuth was decades later. His work in cryptography was equally as seminal. His exploits were legendary, to the point of raising suspicion. Exactly how good he was pales in significance to his work that lead to the cracking of the Enigma machine. To be fair, he came into the project relatively late and Enigma was partially understood. But he cracked the back plate, something that many didn't even realize was there. Enigma was a very clever way to encode and decode messages that the German relied upon. Once we were able to crack the code, we had an unbeatable edge over the Germans. Alan's work also laid the foundations of modern cryptography. But, Alan had a problem. He was a pansy. And not particularly discrete. So he was arrested during the early 1950s, and put in a program that involved hormone treatment to "cure" him. He committed suicide, robbing us of a brilliant mind. en.wikipedia.org