Alan Turing and Oxford
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring
NEWSLETTER | The American Philosophical Association Philosophy and Computers SPRING 2019 VOLUME 18 | NUMBER 2 FEATURED ARTICLE Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot Turing’s Mystery Machine ARTICLES Igor Aleksander Systems with “Subjective Feelings”: The Logic of Conscious Machines Magnus Johnsson Conscious Machine Perception Stefan Lorenz Sorgner Transhumanism: The Best Minds of Our Generation Are Needed for Shaping Our Future PHILOSOPHICAL CARTOON Riccardo Manzotti What and Where Are Colors? COMMITTEE NOTES Marcello Guarini Note from the Chair Peter Boltuc Note from the Editor Adam Briggle, Sky Croeser, Shannon Vallor, D. E. Wittkower A New Direction in Supporting Scholarship on Philosophy and Computers: The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique CALL FOR PAPERS VOLUME 18 | NUMBER 2 SPRING 2019 © 2019 BY THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION ISSN 2155-9708 APA NEWSLETTER ON Philosophy and Computers PETER BOLTUC, EDITOR VOLUME 18 | NUMBER 2 | SPRING 2019 Polanyi’s? A machine that—although “quite a simple” one— FEATURED ARTICLE thwarted attempts to analyze it? Turing’s Mystery Machine A “SIMPLE MACHINE” Turing again mentioned a simple machine with an Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot undiscoverable program in his 1950 article “Computing UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY, CHRISTCHURCH, NZ Machinery and Intelligence” (published in Mind). He was arguing against the proposition that “given a discrete- state machine it should certainly be possible to discover ABSTRACT by observation sufficient about it to predict its future This is a detective story. The starting-point is a philosophical behaviour, and this within a reasonable time, say a thousand discussion in 1949, where Alan Turing mentioned a machine years.”3 This “does not seem to be the case,” he said, and whose program, he said, would in practice be “impossible he went on to describe a counterexample: to find.” Turing used his unbreakable machine example to defeat an argument against the possibility of artificial I have set up on the Manchester computer a small intelligence. -
Verification and Formal Methods
Verification and Formal Methods: Practice and Experience J. C. P. Woodcock University of York, UK and P. G. Larsen Engineering College of Aarhus, Denmark and J. C. Bicarregui STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK and J. S. Fitzgerald Newcastle University, UK We describe the state of the art in the industrial use of formal verification technology. We report on a new survey of the use of formal methods in industry, and compare it with the most significant surveys carried out over the last 20 years. We review the literature on formal methods, and present a series of industrial projects undetaken over the last two decades. We draw some observations from these surveys and records of experience. Based on this, we discuss the issues surrounding the industrial adoption of formal methods. Finally, we look to the future and describe the development of a Verified Software Repository, part of the worldwide Verified Software Initiative. We introduce the initial projects being used to populate the repository, and describe the challenges they address. Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.2.4 [Software/Program Verification]: Assertion check- ers, Class invariants, Correctness proofs, Formal methods, Model checking, Programming by contract; F.3.1 [Specifying and Verifying and Reasoning about Programs]: Assertions, Invariants, Logics of programs, Mechanical verification, Pre- and post-conditions, Specification techniques; F.4.1 [Mathematical Logic]: Mechanical theorem proving; I.2.2 [Automatic Pro- gramming]: Program verification. Additional Key Words and Phrases: Experimental software engineering, formal methods surveys, Grand Challenges, Verified Software Initiative, Verified Software Repository. 1. INTRODUCTION Formal verification, for both hardware and software, has been a topic of great sig- nificance for at least forty years. -
The Turing Guide
The Turing Guide Edited by Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Mark Sprevak, and Robin Wilson • A complete guide to one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century • Covers aspects of Turing’s life and the wide range of his intellectual activities • Aimed at a wide readership • This carefully edited resource written by a star-studded list of contributors • Around 100 illustrations This carefully edited resource brings together contributions from some of the world’s leading experts on Alan Turing to create a comprehensive guide that will serve as a useful resource for researchers in the area as well as the increasingly interested general reader. “The Turing Guide is just as its title suggests, a remarkably broad-ranging compendium of Alan Turing’s lifetime contributions. Credible and comprehensive, it is a rewarding exploration of a man, who in his life was appropriately revered and unfairly reviled.” - Vint Cerf, American Internet pioneer JANUARY 2017 | 544 PAGES PAPERBACK | 978-0-19-874783-3 “The Turing Guide provides a superb collection of articles £19.99 | $29.95 written from numerous different perspectives, of the life, HARDBACK | 978-0-19-874782-6 times, profound ideas, and enormous heritage of Alan £75.00 | $115.00 Turing and those around him. We find, here, numerous accounts, both personal and historical, of this great and eccentric man, whose life was both tragic and triumphantly influential.” - Sir Roger Penrose, University of Oxford Ordering Details ONLINE www.oup.com/academic/mathematics BY TELEPHONE +44 (0) 1536 452640 POSTAGE & DELIVERY For more information about postage charges and delivery times visit www.oup.com/academic/help/shipping/. -
August 2018 FACS a C T S
Issue 2018-1 August 2018 FACS A C T S The Newsletter of the Formal Aspects of Computing Science (FACS) Specialist Group ISSN 0950-1231 FACS FACTS Issue 2018-1 August 2018 About FACS FACTS FACS FACTS (ISSN: 0950-1231) is the newsletter of the BCS Specialist Group on Formal Aspects of Computing Science (FACS). FACS FACTS is distributed in electronic form to all FACS members. Submissions to FACS FACTS are always welcome. Please visit the newsletter area of the BCS FACS website for further details at: http://www.bcs.org/category/12461 Back issues of FACS FACTS are available for download from: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/33135 The FACS FACTS Team Newsletter Editors Tim Denvir [email protected] Brian Monahan [email protected] Editorial Team Jonathan Bowen, John Cooke, Tim Denvir, Brian Monahan, Margaret West. Contributors to this issue Jonathan Bowen, John Cooke, Tim Denvir, Sofia Meacham. Brian Monahan, Bill Stoddart, Botond Virginas, Margaret West BCS-FACS websites BCS: http://www.bcs-facs.org LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2427579 Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/BCS-FACS/120243984688255 Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCS-FACS If you have any questions about BCS-FACS, please send these to Paul Boca [email protected] 2 FACS FACTS Issue 2018-1 August 2018 Editorial Dear readers, welcome to our first issue of FACS FACTS for 2018. This year, 2018, marks the 40th anniversary of FACS. At least one editor recalls an article by Dan Simpson, member of the editorial team at the time, FACS at 10 in 1988. -
Ted Nelson History of Computing
History of Computing Douglas R. Dechow Daniele C. Struppa Editors Intertwingled The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson History of Computing Founding Editor Martin Campbell-Kelly, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK Series Editor Gerard Alberts, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Advisory Board Jack Copeland, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand Ulf Hashagen, Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany John V. Tucker, Swansea University, Swansea, UK Jeffrey R. Yost, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA The History of Computing series publishes high-quality books which address the history of computing, with an emphasis on the ‘externalist’ view of this history, more accessible to a wider audience. The series examines content and history from four main quadrants: the history of relevant technologies, the history of the core science, the history of relevant business and economic developments, and the history of computing as it pertains to social history and societal developments. Titles can span a variety of product types, including but not exclusively, themed volumes, biographies, ‘profi le’ books (with brief biographies of a number of key people), expansions of workshop proceedings, general readers, scholarly expositions, titles used as ancillary textbooks, revivals and new editions of previous worthy titles. These books will appeal, varyingly, to academics and students in computer science, history, mathematics, business and technology studies. Some titles will also directly appeal to professionals and practitioners -
Alan Turing's Forgotten Ideas
Alan Turing, at age 35, about the time he wrote “Intelligent Machinery” Copyright 1998 Scientific American, Inc. lan Mathison Turing conceived of the modern computer in 1935. Today all digital comput- Aers are, in essence, “Turing machines.” The British mathematician also pioneered the field of artificial intelligence, or AI, proposing the famous and widely debated Turing test as a way of determin- ing whether a suitably programmed computer can think. During World War II, Turing was instrumental in breaking the German Enigma code in part of a top-secret British operation that historians say short- ened the war in Europe by two years. When he died Alan Turing's at the age of 41, Turing was doing the earliest work on what would now be called artificial life, simulat- ing the chemistry of biological growth. Throughout his remarkable career, Turing had no great interest in publicizing his ideas. Consequently, Forgotten important aspects of his work have been neglected or forgotten over the years. In particular, few people— even those knowledgeable about computer science— are familiar with Turing’s fascinating anticipation of connectionism, or neuronlike computing. Also ne- Ideas glected are his groundbreaking theoretical concepts in the exciting area of “hypercomputation.” Accord- ing to some experts, hypercomputers might one day in solve problems heretofore deemed intractable. Computer Science The Turing Connection igital computers are superb number crunchers. DAsk them to predict a rocket’s trajectory or calcu- late the financial figures for a large multinational cor- poration, and they can churn out the answers in sec- Well known for the machine, onds. -
Part I Background
Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19746-5 - Transitions and Trees: An Introduction to Structural Operational Semantics Hans Huttel Excerpt More information PART I BACKGROUND © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19746-5 - Transitions and Trees: An Introduction to Structural Operational Semantics Hans Huttel Excerpt More information 1 A question of semantics The goal of this chapter is to give the reader a glimpse of the applications and problem areas that have motivated and to this day continue to inspire research in the important area of computer science known as programming language semantics. 1.1 Semantics is the study of meaning Programming language semantics is the study of mathematical models of and methods for describing and reasoning about the behaviour of programs. The word semantics has Greek roots1 and was first used in linguistics. Here, one distinguishes among syntax, the study of the structure of lan- guages, semantics, the study of meaning, and pragmatics, the study of the use of language. In computer science we make a similar distinction between syntax and se- mantics. The languages that we are interested in are programming languages in a very general sense. The ‘meaning’ of a program is its behaviour, and for this reason programming language semantics is the part of programming language theory devoted to the study of program behaviour. Programming language semantics is concerned only with purely internal aspects of program behaviour, namely what happens within a running pro- gram. Program semantics does not claim to be able to address other aspects of program behaviour – e.g. -
The Standard Model for Programming Languages: the Birth of A
The Standard Model for Programming Languages: The Birth of a Mathematical Theory of Computation Simone Martini Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna, Italy INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, Valbonne, France http://www.cs.unibo.it/~martini [email protected] Abstract Despite the insight of some of the pioneers (Turing, von Neumann, Curry, Böhm), programming the early computers was a matter of fiddling with small architecture-dependent details. Only in the sixties some form of “mathematical program development” will be in the agenda of some of the most influential players of that time. A “Mathematical Theory of Computation” is the name chosen by John McCarthy for his approach, which uses a class of recursively computable functions as an (extensional) model of a class of programs. It is the beginning of that grand endeavour to present programming as a mathematical activity, and reasoning on programs as a form of mathematical logic. An important part of this process is the standard model of programming languages – the informal assumption that the meaning of programs should be understood on an abstract machine with unbounded resources, and with true arithmetic. We present some crucial moments of this story, concluding with the emergence, in the seventies, of the need of more “intensional” semantics, like the sequential algorithms on concrete data structures. The paper is a small step of a larger project – reflecting and tracing the interaction between mathematical logic and programming (languages), identifying some -
4Th International Symposium on Unifying Theories of Programming
Website Call for Papers http://utp12.lri.fr/ Interest in the fundamental problem of the combination of formal notations and theories of programming has grown consistently in recent Chairs years. The theories define, in various different ways, many common Marie-Claude Gaudel ([email protected]) notions, such as abstraction, refinement, choice, termination, feasibility, Burkhart Wolff ([email protected]) concurrency and communication. Despite these differences, such theories may be unified in a way which greatly facilitates their study and Organisation Chair comparison. Moreover, such a unification offers a means of combining different languages describing various facets and artifacts of software Abderrahmane Feliachi ([email protected]) development in a seamless, logically consistent way. Hoare and He's Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP) is widely acknowledged one Invited Speakers of the most significant such unification approaches to have emerged in the last 15 years. Jim Woodcock, University of York, UK. Based on their pioneering work, the aims of the UTP Symposium Jeremy Gibbons, series are to continue reaffirming the significance of the ongoing UTP University of Oxford, UK. project and to stimulate efforts to advance it by providing a focus for the sharing of results by those already actively contributing, and to raise Important Dates awareness of the benefits of such unifying theoretical frameworks among the wider computer science and software engineering Paper submission: March 31, 2012 communities. Notification: May 14, 2012 Camera-ready: June 4, 2012 To this end the Symposium welcomes contributions on all the themes Symposium: August 27-28, 2012 that can be related to the Unifying Theories of Programming. -
Plaque Schemes Across England
PLAQUE SCHEMES ACROSS ENGLAND Plaque schemes are listed below according to region and county, apart from thematic schemes which have a national remit. The list includes: the name of the erecting body (with a hyperlink to a website where possible); a note of whether the scheme is active, dormant, proposed or complete; and a link to an email contact where available. While not all organisations give details of their plaques on their websites, the information included on the register should enable you to contact those responsible for a particular scheme. In a few cases, plaques are described as ‘orphaned’, which indicates that they are no longer actively managed or maintained by the organisation that erected them. English Heritage is not responsible for the content of external internet sites. BEDFORDSHIRE Bedford Borough ACTIVE Council Various historical schemes BEDFORDSHIRE Biggleswade COMPLETED Contact EAST History Society 1997-2004 BEDFORDSHIRE Dunstable COMPLETED Contact Town Council CAMBRIDGESHIRE Cambridge Blue ACTIVE Contact Plaques Scheme since 2001 CAMBRIDGESHIRE Eatons ACTIVE Contact Community Association 1 PLAQUE SCHEMES ACROSS ENGLAND CAMBRIDGESHIRE Great Shelford ACTIVE Contact Oral History Group CAMBRIDGESHIRE Littleport Society AD HOC One-off plaque erected in 2011, more hoped for. CAMBRIDGESHIRE Peterborough ACTIVE Contact Civic Society since the 1960s CAMBRIDGESHIRE St Ives ACTIVE Contact EAST Civic Society since 2008 CAMBRIDGESHIRE St Neots Local ACTIVE Contact History Society ESSEX (Basildon) PROPOSED Contact Foundation -
The London University Atlas
The London University Atlas: A talk given at the Atlas 50th Anniversary Symposium on 5th December 2012. Dik Leatherdale. London >> Manchester London University was, indeed still is, a HUGE organisation even by the standards of this place. It’s a collegiate university the individual colleges spread across the capital from Queen Mary College in the east end to the baroque splendour of Royal Holloway in leafy Egham built, you may be interested to learn, upon the proceeds of Victorian patent medicines hardly any of which had any beneficial effect whatsoever. In the “build it yourself” era, two of the colleges took the plunge. At Imperial College, Keith Tocher, Sid Michaelson and Tony Brooker constructed the “Imperial College Computing Engine” using relays. With the benefit of hindsight, this looks like a dead end in development. But Imperial weren’t the only team to put their faith in relay technology. Neither were they the last. Yet amazingly, the legacy of ICCE lived on because of a chance lunchtime conversation years later between Tom Kilburn and Tony Brooker, the Atlas adder logical design was derived from that of ICCE. Over in the unlikely surroundings of Birkbeck College, Andrew Booth was building a series of low cost, low performance machines. His ambition was to build computers cheap enough for every college to be able to afford one. You might say he invented the minicomputer a decade before anybody noticed. His designs were taken up by the British Tabulating Machine company and became the ICT 1200 series; for a while the most popular computer in the UK. -
Blue Plaque Guide
Blue Plaque Guide Research and Cultural Collections 2 Blue Plaque Guide Foreword 3 Introduction 4 1 Dame Hilda Lloyd 6 2 Leon Abrams and Ray Lightwood 7 3 Sir Norman Haworth 8 4 Sir Peter Medawar 9 5 Charles Lapworth 10 6 Frederick Shotton 11 7 Sir Edward Elgar 12 8 Sir Granville Bantock 13 9 Otto Robert Frisch and Sir Rudolf E Peierls 14 10 John Randall and Harry Boot 15 11 Sir Mark Oliphant 16 12 John Henry Poynting 17 13 Margery Fry 18 14 Sir William Ashley 19 15 George Neville Watson 20 16 Louis MacNeice 21 17 Sir Nikolaus Pevsner 22 18 David Lodge 23 19 Francois Lafi tte 24 20 The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 25 21 John Sutton Nettlefold 26 22 John Sinclair 27 23 Marie Corelli 28 Acknowledgments 29 Visit us 30 Map 31 Blue Plaque Guide 3 Foreword Across the main entrance to the Aston Webb Building, the historic centre of our campus, is a line of standing male figures carved into the fabric by Henry Pegram. If this were a cathedral, they would be saints or prophets; changed the world, from their common home the University but this is the University of Birmingham, and the people of Birmingham. who greet us as we pass through those doors are Beethoven, Virgil, Michelangelo, Plato, Shakespeare, The University’s Research and Cultural Collections, Newton, Watt, Faraday and Darwin. While only one of working with Special Collections, the Lapworth Museum, those (Shakespeare) was a local lad, and another (Watt) the Barber Institute of Fine Arts and Winterbourne House local by adoption, together they stand for the primacy of and Garden, reflect the cross-disciplinary nature of the creativity.