---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: S Barry Cooper <[email protected]> Date: Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 9:58 AM Subject: [ATY/TCAC] July update on the Alan Turing Year To: CiE <[email protected]>
Dear All Increasing amounts of news of ATY events have been coming in. Here is the latest sample. Apologies for omissions, and even more apologies for anyone still waiting for a reply to an email - but please do keep the news coming in, and all will be answered eventually! And please do send us interesting and useful web links. Many thanks to all those who have added the ATY logo to their webpages. You can find the small version of the logo at: http://www.turingcentenary.eu/ And a bigger one at: http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/Images/ATY.logo5.jpg 1) The planned re-publication of Sara Turing's biography of her son by Cambridge University Press is proceeding nicely, with an introduction by Martin Davis, and a fascinating unpublished piece by Alan's brother John. It is also hoped to retain the historically important Foreword by Lyn Irvine, friend of Alan and wife of Max Newman. We should be very grateful to the Turing family and CUP for what is sure to be a major Turing centenary publishing event. 2) The search for recordings of Turing's voice continue - There is still a hope that recordings of the old discussion broadcasts from 1951-52 might be found. There are details of these at the Turing Digital Archive, for instance 'Can automatic calculating machines be said to think?': http://www.turingarchive.org/browse.php/B/6 - discussion transmitted on BBC Third Programme, 14 and 23 Jan. 1952, between M.H.A. Newman, A.M. Turing, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson and R.B. Braithwaite. Did the BBC keep recordings of such programmes usually? If so, to what extent did they get discarded later? Is difficulty finding the recordings due to them probably not existing, or due to randomness of cataloguing? Mark Cotton is talking to Bill Thompson from BBC Click, who has a role on the BBC Digital Archive project. And Huma Shah has talked to Jeremy Paxman! 3) TCAC participation in the Computing at School teachers conference included a workshop by Faron Moller and Huma Shah on "Alan Turing Centennial: The Legacy of a Computer Scientist" - see: http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/index.php?id=shah I should mention Huma has also been talking to the new management of the Colonnade Hotel in London (the birthplace of Alan Turing) about a renewal of the special deal for Turing centenary followers wanting to stay there in 2012. 4) Collette Curry from Manchester is involved in a Turing Chatbot project, which may go online very soon. Collette has some valuable experience with other projects - here is an example of her work for the Ark Royal website: http://www.chaturing.com/mmuProjectCC/site/publish/ 5) Julian Wagstaff is still gathering support and funding for the re-staging of his short opera "The Turing Test" - you can now see online clips of the successful Edinburgh production at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSN94RXfcmM Amongst various promising developments, there is interest in a German production as part of the Turing Year. 6) The Royal Society have agreed two Turing-themed issues of their publications - a 2012 issue of the Philosophical Transactions A including Turing-related articles on the mathematics and physical sciences; and an issue of their interdisciplinary journal Interface Focus including articles on developments arising from Turing's work on mathematics and the biological sciences. 7) A new Turing-related journal is due to be launched in 2012 - this is taken from the call for papers: ________________________________________________________________ COMPUTABILITY The Journal of the Association CiE Now Accepting Submissions! First volume to be published in 2012 as part of the celebrations of the Alan Turing Year http://www.computability.de/journal/ ________________________________________________________________ 8) The Turing Centenary Research Fellowship and Scholar Competition has gone online: http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/give-page.php?408 Funded by the John Templeton Foundation, the Turing Centenary Research Project - Mind, Mechanism and Mathematics will make 5 awards of 75,000 pounds to Turing Research Fellows, and 3 awards of 45,000 pounds to Turing Research Scholars, in the 16 to 25 age group. Incidentally, the JTF is looking for a Program Associate to work with their department of Mathematical and Physical Sciences - details at: http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/jtf.post.pdf 9) There was a fascinating meeting of the ATY Centenary Arts and Culture Subcommittee at The Arts Catalyst in London, on June 20, attended by around 10 people. A number of plans were discussed, including involvement in the AISB/IACAP Congress in Birmingham next year: http://events.cs.bham.ac.uk/turing12/ ACC Co-Chair Anna Dumitriu mentioned the idea of a Global Hackerspace Challenge related to Turing, with the winner of the hacker space challenge going to the Birmingham event to present. Also discussed were plans for performances of Valeria Patera's play on "Alan's Apple: Hacking the Turing Test". It was great to see Valeria in London, on one of her frequent visits to the UK from her base in Rome. 10) Some more meetings news: (a) The Ninth International Conference on Computability and Complexity in Analysis ( CCA 2012) has just gone online: http://cca-net.de/cca2012/ Held as a satellite meeting of the CiE Turing Centenary Conference in Cambridge, it will run June 24-27, 2012. (b) Also - the 8th International Workshop on Developments in Computational Models (DCM 2012), another satellite event of CiE 2012, is about to go online - just for private information at the moment, here is the 'under construction' webpage: http://www.math.uni-hamburg.de/home/loewe/DCM2012/ (c) And, In Trento in Italy there will be a meeting on "Turing's Economics" - the ASSRU Newsletter says: "As part of the Turing Birth Centennial Celebrations a two-day conference emphasising the role of computability, solvability and decidability in economic theory and game theory will be held in April/May, 2012 under the auspices of ASSRU. Apart from contributions by resident ASSRU members, it is expected that Barry Cooper, Greg Chaitin, Cristian Calude, Barkley Rosser and Shu-Heng Chen will be invited contributors at this conference." (d) Worth noting - the 6th European Congress of Mathematics in Krakow, July 2-7, 2012, is asking for proposals for 'Mini-symposia': http://www.6ecm.pl/en/6ecm/mini-symposia Let us know if you would like TCAC support for a Turing-related proposal. There are a number of other meetings being planned, more news to follow. 11) Following on from the recent news item about the presentation to Bletchley Park by William Newman of the Monopoly board he played Alan on as a boy - we heard via Sue Black of moves by Chris Owen to get Hasbro to produce a limited edition set of the ?urning-Newman Monopoly Board?ahead of the Turing year in 2012. Could be a real collectors' item. 12) The 'Challenging Turing' conference team are really getting into the centenary spirit, announcing that they would be "celebrating Alan Turing's [99th] birthday and his visionary spirit with some cake at Stanford University [on June 23rd 2011] from 3:00-5:00 in the Gates Fujitsu Lounge (4th Floor)". 13) After hearing from the nephew of Alan Turing's friend, Christopher Morcom - also named Christopher Morcom, and also an alumnus of Alan's old school Sherborne, we were delighted to hear from the Head of Sherborne, that "we are indeed planning to put on a series of events and other activities to celebrate Alan Turing's centenary in 2012". Hopefully, more news to follow. 14) Fiona Auty from Turing's old haunt, the National Physical Laboratory (how did he ever fit so much into his short life?) writes about the emerging plans for involvement of the NPL in the Turing Year. They have interesting Turing-related historical materials, and are planning to put some of these on the web. She says "I am hoping to sort out a lecture on his work here and then the subsequent IT work that NPL went on to do". If you would like to talk to Fiona about NPL involvement in the ATY, please ask for her contact details. 15) Finally, I would like to share with you a wonderful letter from a reader in Stockport (necessarily anonymised): "Thank you for forwarding the email regarding the mention of Alan Turing in Obama's speech to parliament. I don't know how I got on your mailing list but thanks a lot anyway. For several reasons Alan Turing is (or should that be was) (no he still is) very special to me. Firstly we were both marathon runners, albeit that he was competing some 10 years before me. His personal best was recorded in 1947 whilst mine was achieved in 1956. Secondly we both have the same birth sign and I shall have celebrated my 82nd a couple of weeks before we celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birthday at his statue in Sackville Gardens in Manchester's Gay Village. Thirdly from 1949 until 1952 we both used the same area off Oxford Road in the centre of Manchester for our evening social activities ( both of us, I suspect diligently trying to keep the 11th Commandment (Thou Shall Not Get Caught)). I was devastated, along with many more of the homosexual community, when we heard of his death after being hounded by the authorities. So much for British justice when you report a theft and finish up on a charge of gross indecency. In 2007 the older LGBT group in Manchester, of which I am a member gave, as our contribution to LGBT History Month, a cabaret performance of what we called "An Evening With". During the course of the evening we introduced our audience to Gay Icons (both past and present) who had some connection with Manchester. We were helped in our task by two professional members of The Library Theatre here in Manchester who gave us guidance in our writing of our scripts and with our performance. I was very honoured to be allowed to perform an imaginary soliloquy (which I had written with a little help from the professionals) in the persona of Alan where he tells of his life in terms of it being three races - The Rat Race (work), The Sporting Race (relaxation) and The Human Race (living). Forward to next year, the centenary of his birth, I am hoping that I can take some active part. Who knows maybe give an encore of the soliloquy. Anyway thank you once again for sending me the email and for reading my long-winded reply. God bless you." I hope other readers will be as moved by this, and have got an insight into Alan Turing's Manchester years, as I was reading this. All best Barry __________________________________________________________________________ ALAN TURING YEAR http://www.turingcentenary.eu Email: [email protected] Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/The-Alan-Turing-Year/199853901070 and http://en-gb.facebook.com/people/Alan-Turing-Year/100000473465821 Twitter: http://twitter.com/AlanTuringYear __________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Logica-l mailing list [email protected] http://www.dimap.ufrn.br/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/logica-l
