Turing and von Neumann - Professor Raymond Flood
124,735
Published 2016-04-26
Alan Turing (1912-1954) and John von Neumann (1903-1957) had an enormous range of interests not only in pure mathematics but also in practical applications. They made major contributions during the Second World War; Turing on cryptography and von Neumann on weapons development. The Turing machine formalised the idea of an algorithm and the Turing test is important in artificial intelligence while von Neumann founded the subject of game theory. Both are considered founders of computer science.
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/turing-and-v…
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All Comments (21)
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John von Neumann was like the "ideal" man, he was humble, soft spoken and kind, also, he had an incredibly brilliant mind. He is one of the few true intellectual giants who were actually nice people.
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How do we not have a movie / documentary on Neumann already?
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Turing and Von Neumann, both instrumental in defining the modern computer, hardware and software, were taken from us too early, in their prime. Let us be sure to look after our talent much better in future.
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I love that introductory slide... I don't know how carefully Professor Flood chose those two portraits (in fact it just looks like the "standard" pic of JvN)... but JUST LOOK at the way Turing is looking at von Neumann.
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4:00 I fell off my chair 🤣, perhaps one of the most apt examples of what Von Neumann was capable of
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Great conference joining two parallel lives that seem more typical of Schrondinger's world. Everything is extraordinary about John von Neumann from his childhood in the self-demanding Jewish upper class of Budapest until his death. The Hungarian Martians represented an extraordinary concentration of scientists. A Faust greater than the literary one. With his intellectual and mathematical Neumann ego he managed to excel in almost all branches of science, thanks to his mathematical basis.
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I remember my programming classes were the instructor emphasised any loop we programmed must have only 1 entry point and 1 exit point. A Turing machine!
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It is hard not to weep when contemplating how profound Turing's contribution to human progress and thought was.
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All mr Floods lectures are just great.
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Von Neumann was a genius without a doubt, the question is: was he born like that? or just did the hungarian education system turn him into a genius at relative early age?. He contributed to many different fields of interest, in both practical and theoretical ways. His memory was astonished, he also liked going out to bars etc during his bachelor years, he really also liked enjoying social life. He was a very likable guy.
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Excellent presentation and thank you. Can you please recommend biographies of both subjects? Would appreciate your direction on it.
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Outstanding
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The slide at 25:00 states incorrectly that the tape in a Turing machine moves right or left. This is obviously impossible since the tape is infinite in both directions, and Turing knew the idea would strike anyone as silly. It is the notional machine that moves.
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What a great lecture!
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he did the ALU memory , cpu design
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thank you, that was really good. Kinda wish you'd gone to town on the outrageous behaviour of the uk establishment's treatment of Turing, they should now face some sort of prosecution ... and I feel sick and sorry, but I couldnt have typed this without him.
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The fly is huge! hahaha classic geometric series
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The Enigma Machine is an emulation, at human scale, of line-of-sight observation of the resonant unity, ONE-INFINITY Totality and transverse trancendental sync-duration positioning integration, sum-of-all-histories frequency density-intensity alignment amplitudes, AM-FM Communication. ("You just look at it", and see the Universal Turing Mechanism of prime-cofactor wave-packaging holography, pure-math relative-timing ratio-rates Perspective Circuitry)
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They, the English, did to Turring what they did to Churchill, sacked and sent them to their graves early. No matter what they thought their problems were back then, nothing justifies what they did to both incredibly and gifted geniuses 💚. The world was not deserving of either!
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I often wonder how it would be to be a child protegí . But I wasn’t so I hear about all these people who were. Very interesting but I struggle to understand some of it. But then I try again and again and this helps . Thank you for all of these shows. The story goes that turings tragic death due to an able is why iPhones have a able with a bite! Jobs did never confirm that but why not
