On Wednesday, May 13, 2015 at 9:17:48 AM UTC+5:30, Ian wrote: > On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 9:11 PM, zipher wrote: > > I know. That's because most people have fallen off the path > > (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OneTruePath). > > You wrote that, didn't you? I recognize that combination of delusional > narcissism and curious obsession with Turing machines.
Interestingly saw this (CACM) the other day: http://www.tomandmaria.com/Tom/Writing/CACMActuallyTuringDidNotInventTheComputer.pdf non-delusional and in the opposite direction: Turing's is a paper on mathematical logic. It describes a thought experiment, like Schrödinger's famous 1935 description of a trapped cat shifting between life and death in response to the behavior of a single atom. Schrödinger was not trying to advance the state of the art of feline euthanasia. Neither was Turing proposing the construction of a new kind of calculating machine. As the title of his paper suggested, Turing designed his ingenious imaginary machines to address a question about the fundamental limits of mathematical proof. They were structured for simplicity, and had little in common with the approaches taken by people designing actual machines. Von Neumann's report said nothing explicitly about mathematical logic. It described the architecture of an actual planned computer and the technologies by which it could be realized, and was written to guide the team that had already won a contract to develop the EDVAC. Von Neumann does abstract away from details of the hardware, both to focus instead on what we would now call "architecture" and because the computer projects under way at the Moore School were still classified in 1945. His letters from that period are full of discussion of engineering details, such as sketches of particular vacuum tube models and their performance characteristic -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
