I followed up some of the references in Soare's article to the
following article by Andrew Hodges in 2004 -- the 50th anniversary
of Turing's death. He has further discussion of Turing's views
about computability and the many interpretations since then: (01)
http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_tur04_paper1.pdf
Alan Turing: the logical and physical basis of computing (02)
The concluding paragraph raises some intriguing research issues: (03)
> What Turing analysed to such great effect in 1936 was the idea of doing
> finitely many things at a time — but those words ‘doing’, ‘finite’,
> ‘thing’, ‘at’, ‘a’, ‘time’, apparently so simple, are far from clear
> at the level of fundamental physics. It is not just the relationship
> between the integers and the reals that is involved: far more subtle
> features of the complex numbers and analytic functions seem to enter
> in an essential way into physical reality, for reasons which are far
> from clear. Alan Turing’s last postcard (Turing 1954b) — which should
> not be taken as the thesis of any church! — is an appropriate ending.
> Or perhaps it is a starting-point for the next fifty years:
>
> Hyperboloids of wondrous Light
> Rolling for aye through Space and Time
> Harbour those waves that somehow Might
> Play out God’s holy pantomime. (04)
John (05)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J (06)
|