本帖最后由 tracywlz 于 2009-4-17 23:05 编辑
Alan Turing
While addressing a problem in the arcane field of mathematical logic, he imagined a machine that could mimic human reasoning. Sound familiar?
By PAUL GRAY
Monday, March 29, 1999
If all Alan Turing had done was answer, in the negative(否定地), a vexing question in the arcane realm of mathematical logic, few nonspecialists today would have any reason to remember him. But the method Turing used to show that certain propositions in a closed logical system cannot be proved within that system — a corollary to the proof that made Kurt Godel famous — had enormous consequences in the world at large. For what this eccentric young Cambridge don did was to dream up an imaginary machine — a fairly simple typewriter-like contraption capable somehow of scanning, or reading, instructions encoded on a tape of theoretically infinite length. As the scanner moved from one square of the tape to the next — responding to the sequential commands and modifying its mechanical response if so ordered — the output of such a process, Turing demonstrated, could replicate logical human thought. (一个不合群的年轻人提出一个跨时代的梦想)
Does this concept — a fairly rudimentary assemblage of hardware performing prodigious and multifaceted tasks according to the dictates of the instructions fed to it — sound familiar? It certainly didn't in 1937, when Turing's seminal paper, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs problem," appeared in "Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society." Turing's thoughts were recognized by the few readers capable of understanding them as theoretically interesting, even provocative.
But no one recognized that Turing's machine provided a blueprint for what would eventually become the electronic digital computer. (理论上的东西不被大多数人接受)
So many ideas and technological advances converged to create the modern computer that it is foolhardy to give one person the credit for inventing it. But the fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.
Turing's 1937 paper changed the direction of his life and embroiled a shy and vulnerable man ever more directly in the affairs of the world outside, ultimately with tragic consequences.
Alan Mathison Turing was born in London in 1912, the second of his parents' two sons. His father was a member of the British civil service in India, an environment that his mother considered unsuitable for her boys. So John and Alan Turing spent their childhood in foster households in England, separated from their parents except for occasional visits back home. Alan's loneliness during this period may have inspired his lifelong interest in the operations of the human mind, how it can create a world when the world it is given proves barren or unsatisfactory. (小时候环境对成长的影响。图灵小时后的孤僻造就了他的独立思考能力,同时,也最终导致了悲剧。)
After twice failing to win a fellowship at the University of Cambridge's Trinity College, a lodestar at the time for mathematicians from around the world, Turing received a fellowship from King's College, Cambridge. King's, under the guidance of such luminaries as John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster, provided a remarkably free and tolerant environment for Turing, who thrived there even though he was not considered quite elegant enough to be initiated into King's inner circles. When he completed his degree requirements, Turing was invited to remain at King's as a tutor. And there he might happily have stayed, pottering about with(闲逛于问题间)伯乐对于天才的重要性
After the war, Turing returned to Cambridge, hoping to pick up the quiet academic life he had intended. But the newly created mathematics division of the British National Physical Laboratory offered him the opportunity to create an actual Turing machine, the ACE or Automatic Computing Engine, and Turing accepted. What he discovered, unfortunately, was that the emergency spirit that had short-circuited so many problems at Bletchley Park during the war had dissipated. Bureaucracy, red tape and interminable delays once again were the order of the day. Finding most of his suggestions dismissed, ignored or overruled, Turing eventually left the NPL for another stay at Cambridge and then accepted an offer from the University of Manchester where another computer was being constructed along the lines he had suggested back in 1937. (政府对科学的抑制)
Unfortunately, reality caught up with Turing well before his vision would, if ever, be realized. In Manchester, he told police investigating a robbery at his house that he was having "an affair" with a man who was probably known to the burglar. Always frank about his sexual orientation, Turing this time got himself into real trouble. Homosexual relations were still a felony in Britain, and Turing was tried and convicted of "gross indecency" in 1952. He was spared prison but subjected to injections of female hormones intended to dampen his lust. "I'm growing breasts!" Turing told a friend. On June 7, 1954, he committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide. He was 41. (死于社会的不理解。社会对于人才的影响,是否应该包容他们的缺点?或者道德这个东西,到底以什么为标准?)
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