The Turing Guide

(nextflipdebug5) #1

CHAPTER 42


Turing’s legacy


jonathan bowen and jack copeland


I


n terms of public appreciation Turing has risen quickly from zero to hero. The decades of
obscurity (Who did you say? Turning?) came to an end with the much-publicized Royal
Pardon of 2013 and, before that, the widespread international celebrations in 2012 dur-
ing the centenary of his birth—celebrations that formed a spontaneous collective decentral-
ized yell, by academics, artists, broadcasters, politicians, athletes, and others: ACCLAIM
HIM! Suddenly Turing went viral. This final chapter surveys his burgeoning legacy: cultural,
political, scientific, and linguistic. It is a work in progress. Turing’s renown is growing too
fast for any final assessment.

finding Turing


Turing invented the universal machine, representing the stored-program computer in its most
general and abstract form; and with hindsight his seminal 1936 paper ‘On computable numbers’
foretold the capabilities of the modern computer. During the Second World War he recognized
that computing machines could carry out important tasks fast and reliably, even tasks requiring
intelligence when done by human beings. Unlike some theorists, Turing had a strong practical
bent and was as happy to wield a soldering iron as to wrestle with an abstract mathematical
problem. The story of his post-war contributions to the design and development of electronic
computers was told in Chapters 20–22.
Yet placing Turing is always difficult. He was not the inventor of the computer, but one among
a diffuse group of mathematicians and engineers who brought the new machines into existence
(see Chapter 6). For the same reason he was not the founder of computer science; and in any
case the title ‘founder of computer science’ is anachronistic: Turing had been dead for 6 years
before George Forsythe coined the term ‘computer science’ and the first university departments
of computer science began to emerge. Nevertheless, the new discipline of computer science was
certainly grounded in the fundamental ideas of Turing and his contemporaries, including John
von Neumann, Maurice Wilkes, and Tom Kilburn.
Free download pdf