'Codebreaker – Alan Turing's life and legacy' at the Science Museum – video

Day 1 Turing100@Manchester - an impression in photo's, quotes and audio recordings

An impression of Day 1 of the Alan Turing Centenary Conference in Manchester.

Click on one of the photo's to view them all in bigger format.

Vint Cerf, father of the internet & Turing Award winner: “Turing always took the first principles approach.”

You can also listen to my audio recording of Cerf's talk:

Michael Rabin, Turing Award winner: “The universal Turing Machine shows how the power of a pure idea can absolutely change the world.”

You can also listen to my audio recording of Rabin's talk:

David Ferrucci, leader of the IBM Watson team that won the Jeopardy quiz against the two best human players in 2011: “The Watson supercomputer led to two types of reactions. On the one hand there were people saying: ‘What’s the deal? Don’t computers know everything? On the other hand there were people saying: ‘Beating the best humans in Jeopardy? That’s amazing! People find it difficult to understand what is easy and what is difficult for computers.”

Adi Shamir, Turing Award winner and co-inventor of RSA-cryptography: “The Germans made two mistakes in the Enigma cryptography project. They underestimated the computational power of the Allied Forces. And they overestimated their own cryptography designers and operators. The weakness of cryptography is mostly due to human mistakes or human stupidity.”

You can also listen to my audio recording of Shamir's talk:

Frederick Brooks, Turing Award winner and the man behind the IBM System/360 (1964): “Turing’s Pilot ACE has had little effect on the design of computer architecture. This is due to a couple of reasons. Turing didn’t publish his 1945-proposal. Turing was not very collaborative. The ACE was finished too late (2,5 years after the Manchester ‘Baby’ and 1,5 year after the EDSAC). Last but not least: Turing didn’t foresee the importance of programming ease, effort and cost. Turing should be credited for many things, but to say that he is the father of the computer is an exaggeration.”

You can also listen to my audio recording of Brooks' talk:

The Alan Turing statue in Sackville Park, Manchester

Photo's: Bennie Mols, 23 June 2012

Click here for Day 2 and Day 3 of the conference.

Google commemorates Alan Turing's 100th birthday

Google's search engine is also a Turing machine

'Kakkerlak is slimmer dan robots'

Lees hier het interview met mij over 'Turings Tango' dat universiteitsblad TU Delta vandaag publiceerde.

Alan Turing's Universal Machine: the modern computer

Turing Patterns and Animal Markings

Alan Turing is best known for the Turing Machine, breaking the Enigma-code and the Turing Test. Much less known is that he is one of the founders of mathematical biology, by writing in 1952 the article ‘The chemical basis of morphogenesis’. 

Because Turing knew nothing of genetics, scientists have long underestimated his one and only publication in mathematical biology. But the paper contains a load of interesting ideas and is on the transition point between the era of analytical mathematics and computational mathematics.

At the Turing Centenary conference How the World Computes mathematician Ian Stewart gave a public lecture this evening on Turing patterns and animal markings.

Here are some photo impressions with some quotes (click on the first one and you can go through all of them in larger format).

Ian Stewart: "If Turing would be alive today, he would be staggered where his theory on pattern formation has arrived."

Ian Stewart: "Patterns form by broken symmetries."

Ian Stewart: "Turing's reaction-diffusion equations show that local non-linearity combined with global diffusion create striking and often complex patterns."

Ian Stewart: "Theorem: A spotted animal can have a striped tail, but a striped animal cannot have a spotted tail."

And here are some stunning examples from patterns on shells from the Zoology Museum in Cambridge, next door to the conference:

This one has the pattern of a Sierpinski gasket:

Here are some more examples:

Later I will upload an MP3 audio recording of the lecture.

For the Dutch national newpaper NRC Handelsblad of Saturday June 23 I have written an article about Alan Turing's least known scientific contribution: mathematical biology, especially pattern formation.

Bletchley Park - Enigma, Turing & Colossus

Home of the Enigma code breakers during World War II

Birth place of one of the first computers, the Colossus

Homage to Alan Turing: computer pioneer, Enigma code breaker & founder of Artificial Intelligence

Click on the first image and you can go through all of them in larger format:

Some Enigma machines

A rebuilt Bombe, used to break the Enigma code (front view)

Bombe (back view)

The Colossus was used to break the Lorenz cipher machine 

(it's a one purpose semi programmable computer)

Some other stuff...

Photo's: Bennie Mols, 18 June 2012