Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[scriver]

Happy Birthyesterday!

[martinuzz]

Happy Afterbirthday

[SalmonGod]

It was visually stunning.

It made no bloody sense.

Are you referring to Blade Runner or Fury Road?

[hector13]

It was visually stunning.

It made no bloody sense.

Are you referring to Blade Runner or Fury Road?

Fury Road.

Blade Runner is a piece of shit, but that’s just because I’m something of a purist when it comes to source material. It’s pretty good (the first one, anyway) if you don’t consider how awfully it treats the book.

[Rolan7]

So I'm on Youtube.  The Sloop John B, for reasons.  And for some reason I hit the "Mix" recommendation, maybe out of curiosity.

And it recommends The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

I also watched that movie on Netflix about Turing, recently.  Liberties aside...
He would be proud of modern algorithms.
♂♂

[Bumber]

So I'm on Youtube.  The Sloop John B, for reasons.  And for some reason I hit the "Mix" recommendation, maybe out of curiosity.

And it recommends The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

I also watched that movie on Netflix about Turing, recently.  Liberties aside...
He would be proud of modern algorithms.
♂♂

The later recommended this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOwSaSl_PGk

lel

[TheBiggerFish]

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is a good song.

[bloop_bleep]

I also watched that movie on Netflix about Turing, recently.  Liberties aside...
He would be proud of modern algorithms.
♂♂

Turing machines didn't have RAM -- they had a head which could only move one space at a time.

He probably would be confused before he would be proud if someone explained modern algorithms to him.

[Putnam]

Confused? doubt it, all that would need to be explained is memory

[bloop_bleep]

Sure, but *everything* changes when you introduce RAM -- algorithms become much different. Trying to explain quicksort, for example, would take him several minutes to process.

[Rolan7]

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is a good song.

If anything is taken from this fustercluck, it would be this.
They, the crew, should be remembered.

...Also that Alan Turing was gay, that's also up there.

We are not rare, and we are maybe even more likely to be fucked-up historical figures, because the most fucked-up of us are those of us which invent shit.
Except for a certain period, "civilization" wasn't "aware" of us, enough to throw us out.
And now I guess we're statistically in charge of inventing everything, and that's *also* sure great for us abnormals.

Never, heh forget the Androsynth.

[Reelya]

Sure, but *everything* changes when you introduce RAM -- algorithms become much different. Trying to explain quicksort, for example, would take him several minutes to process.

I think you're really underestimating exactly how smart Turing was, and the complexity of the maths he was working with. Sure, if you took the *average* techie from 1940 and tried to explain modern algorithms to them it would take a while. But Turing was many standard deviations above the norm. Quicksort doesn't even need the concept of RAM, you just express it as a method for sorting a list of items, explain the steps and I'm fairly certain that someone of Turing's calibre would intuitively understand what you were talking about.

Additionally, Turing wasn't just a brilliant theoretician of computation and mathemetician, he helped design some of the first computers, including some of the first ones with a stored program. To suggest he'd be stumped by something as basic to explain as Quicksort because it needs "RAM" is in fact very insulting.

On 19 February 1946 Turing presented a detailed paper to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) Executive Committee, giving the first reasonably complete design of a stored-program computer. However, because of the strict and long-lasting secrecy around the Bletchley Park work, he was prohibited (because of the Official Secrets Act) from explaining that he knew that his ideas could be implemented in an electronic device. The better-known EDVAC design presented in the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (dated June 30, 1945), by John von Neumann, who knew of Turing's theoretical work, received much publicity, despite its incomplete nature and questionable lack of attribution of the sources of some of the ideas.
...
Turing's report on the ACE was written in late 1945 and included detailed logical circuit diagrams and a cost estimate of £11,200. He felt that speed and size of memory were crucial and he proposed a high-speed memory of what would today be called 25 kilobytes, accessed at a speed of 1 MHz

Basically he worked out to actually build RAM in his 1945 paper, including detailed schematics. Don't tell me he'd be stumped by goddamn Quicksort now.

[bloop_bleep]

Quicksort becomes just as bad (worse in fact, since it jumps around a lot) as the brute-force sorting algorithms without RAM.

Though I get what you're saying about Turing. He was a smart guy, and contributed greatly to cracking Enigma during the war.

And then the government found out he was gay, didn't credit him for his work, put him on medication for his "condition," thus causing him to eventually commit suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.

The world can be fucking scary sometimes.

[Reelya]

Well not just that actually, read the edit. He came up with the first detailed circuit designs for RAM. Just saying he did some codebreaking and maths is missing the point of just how much of this stuff he thought up himself, before anyone else did. Just learning Quicksort from a textbook is shit a monkey could do. Also:

The ACE implemented subroutine call, whereas the EDVAC did not, and what also set the ACE apart from the EDVAC was the use of Abbreviated Computer Instructions, an early form of programming language.

Basically he came up with stack-based calling and something like assembly language or microcode as concepts in a frikkin 1945 paper which was also the first paper to outline exactly how to build RAM circuits. But we're not talking theoretical stuff here, he handed over complete working schematics for the whole thing, which people then built to his designs. Think about that for a minute. Someone who never saw a working programmable computer comes up with the design, then lays out the needed circuit designs in a frikkin paper, and the things works, plus it's got several advanced concepts such as abbreviated programming languages and stack-based calling in it, too. Which he just thought up by himself then designs circuits for. You have no idea how smart he was.

[Putnam]

yeah, it's like... i don't think euclid would be confused by spherical geometry just because he didn't think of it at the time