🏛🖼 We've rearranged the exhibition space. Feel free to visit the Wall of Giants and the Giants of Information Technology. Which historical figure from this field has inspired you the most? 😍
I propose a variant of the Turing test: the Reyes test. If an AI can write a blog post that convinces me it was written by Jose Reyes, it wins.
Here's just one of the flood of astonishingly creative, witty, and informative posts that Jose has produced since his blog burst onto the scene in February.
I bet no AI will pass the test anytime soon. Unless, of course, Jose /is/ an AI!
I'm still amazed by this every time. Watch the transient dynamics (relatively synchronous dampening #oscillations) of autotroph biomass in a 5-patch #metacommunity turn into an oscillatory #Turing pattern with completely asynchronous dynamics. #Emergence in #complex#systems#science
AND I'M DOING ACTUAL RESEARCH WITH THIS CAN YOU BELIEVE IT THIS IS SO COOL
Namibian "fairy circle" debate rages on: Sand termites or Turing mechanism?
@arstechnica reports: "Himba bushmen in the Namibian grasslands have long passed down legends about the region's mysterious fairy circles: bare, reddish-hued circular patches."
Speaking of the #Entscheidungsproblem, I feel a bit of Schadenfreude for (one of) its author(s), David Hilbert, who was absolutely convinced that mathematics was complete and provable from its own axioms. Hilbert famously has the phrase “Wir müssen wissen—wir werden wissen!” (we must know—we will know!) engraved as his epitaph, as a defiant cry against the phrase “ignorabus et ignorabimus” (we do not know, and we will not know).
Alan #Turing (in addition to Gödel) put the last nail in Hilbert’s hopes by proving that it was impossible to decide the answer to certain classes of computation problems, and therefore mathematics must be incomplete.
Today marks the 69th anniversary of the death of Alan Turing, the "father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence".
"It is impossible to speak of Turing’s achievements and legacy without also mentioning the brutal, institutionalised homophobia that saw him persecuted as a gay man and ultimately cut his life short."
It is heartbreaking that the UK government mistreated Alan Turing. Many AI tech enthusiasts may not be aware of his contributions to the field. In 1950, Turing developed a test for artificial intelligence that is still used today, making him a valuable asset in computer science. Everyone should honor his legacy and memory. RIP, Alan.
@nixCraft It's worth mentioning though that the UK government did (many years later) posthumously pardon Turing. And in the city where he did much of his work, Manchester, there is a lovely statue in one of the city centre parks, as well as buildings and streets named after him.
@nixCraft
A good day to remind everyone that Turing's death was a direct result of a government reaching into the bedroom and prosecuting people for being gay. Imagine all we lost when we lost him. #Turing#LGBTQRights
@nixCraft Alan Turing's legacy is indeed the stuff of legend, and he was treated appallingly badly by the UK government at the time. I would add (as others have in the replies above) that at least two achievements apart from the #Turing test are off-the-charts impressive:
The concept of the Turing machine. He arguably invented the modern CPU.
Cracking the German enigma code in WWII.
Incidentally, there's a great novel by Neal Stephenson called #Cryptonomicon. It's fictional, but it includes Turing as a character. And despite being fiction, the novel gives a great sense of how Turing's work fit into allied strategy in World War 2.
I've been experimenting with Amazon's Polly service. It's their fancy text-to-sort-of-human-style-speech system. Think "Alexa" but with a variety of voices, genders, and accents.
Here's "Brian" - their English, male, received pronunciation voice - reading John Betjeman's poem "Slough":
The pronunciation of all the words is incredibly lifelike. If you heard it on the radio, it mi