Parallel Computing: The End of the Turing Madness(rebelscience.blogspot.com)
rebelscience.blogspot.com
Parallel Computing: The End of the Turing Madness
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2008/06/parallel-computing-end-of-turing.html
6 comments
And I'm not allowed to call this guy a kook...
Oh I think you're not only allowed but encouraged to. Click around his site for some gems like
"I will argue that the messages to the seven churches of Asia are a detailed metaphorical description of the organization and operation of the brain. I will further argue that the golden lampstand (Jewish menorah) symbolizes a seven-node sequence in brain memory."
and the page where he calls a bunch of important physicists (and Goedel) crackpots.
http://www.rebelscience.org/Crackpots/notorious.htm
Moving right along...
Oh I think you're not only allowed but encouraged to. Click around his site for some gems like
"I will argue that the messages to the seven churches of Asia are a detailed metaphorical description of the organization and operation of the brain. I will further argue that the golden lampstand (Jewish menorah) symbolizes a seven-node sequence in brain memory."
and the page where he calls a bunch of important physicists (and Goedel) crackpots.
http://www.rebelscience.org/Crackpots/notorious.htm
Moving right along...
I'm trying to recall where I came across that name before, it may have been on slashdot.
As they say, opinions are a dime a dozen. The author would say that, if the Turing Machine was relevant to parallel programming, we would not have a parallel programming crisis and you would not be reading this and getting all twisted out of shape because your idol is not what he's made out to be.
Since your posting history is intricately entwined with rebel science would it be fair to ask you if you are somehow affiliated ?
So, then I could answer you like this:
I don't have any idols, and Alan Turing wouldn't be one of them but I recognize the man for what he's done and I think that personal attacks have no place in a scientific argument.
By twisting this into an argument about people the 'author' (you ?) displays a shocking lack of tact and detracts from his argument, assuming he has any to make.
The 'parallel programming crisis', as you name it is a reality, there are plenty of people working hard on getting a handle on it, and somehow all of those that are actually productive manage to do that without resorting to personal attacks. Slinging mud at a famous person is one way to become notorious, but it is not a way to achieve anything.
Achievement comes from simply going to work.
So, then I could answer you like this:
I don't have any idols, and Alan Turing wouldn't be one of them but I recognize the man for what he's done and I think that personal attacks have no place in a scientific argument.
By twisting this into an argument about people the 'author' (you ?) displays a shocking lack of tact and detracts from his argument, assuming he has any to make.
The 'parallel programming crisis', as you name it is a reality, there are plenty of people working hard on getting a handle on it, and somehow all of those that are actually productive manage to do that without resorting to personal attacks. Slinging mud at a famous person is one way to become notorious, but it is not a way to achieve anything.
Achievement comes from simply going to work.
The author is a crackpot. See for instance
http://www.rebelscience.org/Seraphim/Physics.htm
("Abstract: Most people never think of the Bible as a source of scientific knowledge. In these pages, I argue that the Bible contains powerful secrets regarding the fundamental structure and composition of the physical universe.")
http://www.rebelscience.org/Seraphim/Physics.htm
("Abstract: Most people never think of the Bible as a source of scientific knowledge. In these pages, I argue that the Bible contains powerful secrets regarding the fundamental structure and composition of the physical universe.")
More enlightened reading:
http://www.rebelscience.org/discussion/viewtopic.php?f=5&...
http://www.rebelscience.org/discussion/viewtopic.php?f=5&...
Moreover,
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=miriam .
Flagging this story so people don't have to waste their time.
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=miriam .
Flagging this story so people don't have to waste their time.
> It is highly unlikely that he ever thought of the concept of parallel processing or the idea that a computer might be used for anything other than problem solving and the execution of instruction sequences.
Well that pinged the old poppycock meter. Turing definitely knew of machines that weren't just used for executing instructions. He briefly alludes to so-called "choice machines" that interacted with an operator in his paper on the Entscheidungsproblem—they're just not his focus.
There are also so called "Multitrack Turing Machines" that seem to fit the author's idea of a parallel machine (multiple heads, multiple tracks). However, these are Turing equivalent (and I believe, but can't find a citation, that Turing was the one who proved that, or at least was aware of it).
The author should read this before he proposes any "new" models of computation which Turing "probably never thought of":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine_equivalents
Well that pinged the old poppycock meter. Turing definitely knew of machines that weren't just used for executing instructions. He briefly alludes to so-called "choice machines" that interacted with an operator in his paper on the Entscheidungsproblem—they're just not his focus.
There are also so called "Multitrack Turing Machines" that seem to fit the author's idea of a parallel machine (multiple heads, multiple tracks). However, these are Turing equivalent (and I believe, but can't find a citation, that Turing was the one who proved that, or at least was aware of it).
The author should read this before he proposes any "new" models of computation which Turing "probably never thought of":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine_equivalents
If anyone is interested in a more impressive take on impending progress with parallel computation, they should take a look at the Ph.D. thesis: Propagation Networks: A Flexible and Expressive Substrate for Computation.[1]
Thesis supervisor: Gerry Sussman.
Thesis committee: Guy Steele Jr., Patrick Winston, and Tom Knight.
Opening paragraph: *"REVOLUTION is at hand. The revolution everyone talks about is, of course, the parallel hardware revolution; less noticed but maybe more important, a paradigm shift is also brewing in the structure of programming languages. Perhaps spurred by changes in hardware architecture, we are reaching away from the old, strictly time-bound expression-evaluation paradigm that has carried us so far, and looking for new means of expressiveness not constrained by over-rigid notions of computational time."
[1] http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/49525/MIT-CSAI...
Thesis supervisor: Gerry Sussman.
Thesis committee: Guy Steele Jr., Patrick Winston, and Tom Knight.
Opening paragraph: *"REVOLUTION is at hand. The revolution everyone talks about is, of course, the parallel hardware revolution; less noticed but maybe more important, a paradigm shift is also brewing in the structure of programming languages. Perhaps spurred by changes in hardware architecture, we are reaching away from the old, strictly time-bound expression-evaluation paradigm that has carried us so far, and looking for new means of expressiveness not constrained by over-rigid notions of computational time."
[1] http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/49525/MIT-CSAI...
Fair warning that's a 176 page pdf.
That's worth posting separately.
That's worth posting separately.
I didn't expect to get such a good laugh out of a HN linked article. Ahhh, what does the future hold for me now?
That's penance in the cobol dungeons for you.
Not until you've written a functional equivalent of emacs using nothing but a card punch and a Univac 1108 will you be released.
Not until you've written a functional equivalent of emacs using nothing but a card punch and a Univac 1108 will you be released.
Dragging Alan Turings reputation in to a technical argument is really bad form.
I guess I'm proving the authors assertion to some extent, but I'm quite sure that nobody ever got scolded for a solid critique of Turings work because he was a homosexual. That's a pretty weird thing to say.
> I am free to bash Turing and his supporters to my heart’s content.
Yes, you are, but it makes no sense to bash the person, an argument should state what you have to say about the mans work.
> In fairness to Turing, my criticism is directed mostly toward those who have turned the man into the infallible god that he never was and never claimed to be.
Right... so that's two full paragraphs now of personal attacks.
> The Turing machine cannot be said to be universal because it is a strictly sequential machine by definition whereas the universe is inherently parallel.
Someone mis-understands the meaning of the word 'universal' in the 'universal Turing machine'.
Don't miss the introduction to the second part:
> If what I write about Alan Turing offends you, then don’t read my stuff. It’s not meant for you. And don’t send me emails to tell me that you don't like it because I don’t care. If I am a kook in your opinion, you are an idiot in mine.
Says that guy writing this on a device that probably wouldn't even have existed if it hadn't been for the person he maligns.
> I have touched on this before in my seminal work on software reliability but I would like to elaborate on it a little to make my point. The computing model that I am proposing is based on an idealized machine that I call the Universal Behaving Machine or UBM for short. It assumes that a computer is a behaving machine that senses and reacts to changes in its environment.
And I'm not allowed to call this guy a kook...
> I think that all the major problems of the computer industry can be attributed to the elitism and intransigence that is rampant in the scientific community. The peer review system is partly to blame. It is a control mechanism that keeps outsiders at bay.
I've heard that exact sentence before I think, it was in the context of some guy claiming that he could extract zero point energy from spinning magnets, he had it working but was too busy to demonstrate it, in spite of being offered a healthy sum of money.
> With the parallel programming crisis in full swing, the computer industry desperately needs a Kuhnian revolution. There is no stopping it. Many reactionaries will fight it teeth and nails but they will fall by the wayside. We are witnessing the beginning of the end of the Turing madness. I say, good riddance.
Indeed.
What a load of tripe.
The Von-Neumann bottleneck is indeed a problem, and there are quite a few people (Sutherland, and, surprisingly, a number of HN'ers) busy in trying to find a way to deal with this.
Whether or not anything like that will ever supercede the Turing 'engine' of computing remains to be seen, for now it seems we will end up with some kind of computing fabric, where each cell is a minimal computational element, and where the cells together will perform computations comparable to the ones we run today on our von-Neumann bottle-necked computers.
But we will still speak of those machines as Turing complete, simply because that is the yardstick by which we measure computation, the ability of a computational device to simulate every other computational device, no matter how inefficient.
Whatever will happen, I'm fairly sure that this guy that tries to make sullying someones name into a platform for his own tripe will not be a part of it.