The letter below appeared in
Nature 429, 501 (03 June 2004);
doi:10.1038/429501c; © Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
Turing's war work counts for more than computers
Sir - John L. Casti, in his fine review of Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of
a Great Thinker, edited by Christof Teuscher ("Touring artificial minds"
Nature 428, 258; 2004), proposes that Turing had more impact on everyday
life than the man named by Time magazine as Person of the Century,
Albert Einstein
(Time 154, 27; 1999). Casti suggests that Turing's 1936
paper provided the "theoretical backbone" for all computers to come.
Although Turing, a hero of mine, certainly was one of the greatest,
we should keep in mind that his paper essentially just elegantly
rephrased
Kurt Gödel's
1931 results and Alonzo Church's extension
thereof. It did not have any impact on the construction of the first
working program-controlled computer. That was made in Berlin by
Konrad Zuse
in 1935-1941 and was driven by practical considerations, not
theoretical ones.
In fact, the greatest impact that Alan Turing made on daily life was
probably through his contribution to cracking the Enigma code, used
by the German military during the Second World War, which is sometimes
cited as a decisive event of the war.
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial
Intelligence (IDSIA), Galleria 2, 6928 Manno-Lugano, Switzerland
