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Britain apologizes for treatment of Alan Turing
Image by Whimsical Chris via Flickr Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apologized on behalf of the British government for the appalling treatment of Alan Turing, who was obliged to undergo chemical...
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Happy Ada Lovelace Day
Fragment of Charles Babbage’s first difference engine, from the collection of the Harvard University Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, here is a fragment...
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Tales of peer review, episode 1: Boyer and Moore’s MJRTY algorithm
I’m generally a big fan of peer review. I think it plays an important role in the improvement and “chromatography” of the scholarly literature. But sometimes. Sometimes. The Boyer-Moore MJRTY algorithm...
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An efficient journal
“You seem to believe in fairies.” Photo of the Cottingley Fairies, 1917, by Elsie Wright via Wikipedia. Aficionados of open access should know about the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), an...
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Processing special collections: An archivist’s workstation
John Tenniel, c. 1864. Study for illustration to Alice’s adventures in wonderland. Harcourt Amory collection of Lewis Carroll, Houghton Library, Harvard University. We’ve just completed spring...
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Talmud and the Turing Test
…the Golem… Image of the statue of the Golem of Prague at the entrance to the Jewish Quarter of Prague by flickr user D_P_R. Used by permission (CC-BY 2.0). Alan Turing, the patron saint of computer...
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For Ada Lovelace Day 2012: Karen Spärck Jones
Karen Spärck Jones, 1935-2007 In honor of Ada Lovelace Day 2012, I write about the only female winner of the Lovelace Medal awarded by the British Computer Society for “individuals who have made an...
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Can gerrymandering be solved with cut-and-choose?
…how to split a cupcake… “Halves” image by flickr user Julie Remizova. Why is gerrymandering even possible in a country with a constitutional right to equal protection?: No State shall make or enforce...
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Heading off to Scotland
…heading to Scotland… “Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh in Scotland, Great Britain” image from Wikimedia Commons I’m excited to be heading to Scotland for much of June under the Distinguished Visiting...
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No, the Turing Test has not been passed.
…that’s not Turing’s Test… “Turing Test” image from xkcd. Used by permission. There has been a flurry of interest in the Turing Test in the last few days, precipitated by a claim that (at last!) a...
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Switching to Markdown for scholarly article production
With few exceptions, scholars would be better off writing their papers in a lightweight markup format called Markdown, rather than using a word-processing program like Microsoft Word. This post...
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The Turing moment
…less histrionic… Ed Stoppard as Alan Turing in Codebreaker We seem to be at the “Turing moment”, what with Benedict Cumberbatch, erstwhile Sherlock Holmes, now starring as a Hollywood Alan Turing in...
View ArticleAaron Swartz’s legacy
Government zealotry in prosecuting brilliant people is a repeating theme. It gave rise to one of the great intellectual tragedies of the 20th century, the death of Alan Turing after his appalling...
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The two Guildford mathematicians
…the huge ledger… Still from Codebreaker showing Turing’s checkout of three Carroll books. The charming town of Guildford, 40 minutes southwest of London on South West Trains, is associated with two...
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In support of behavioral tests of intelligence
…“blockhead” argument… “Blockhead by Paul McCarthy @ Tate Modern” image from flickr user Matt Hobbs. Used by permission. Alan Turing proposed what is the best known criterion for attributing...
View ArticleBecoming tin men
From the 2015 introduction to the 1965 novel The Tin Men by Michael Frayn: “I hadn’t in those days heard of the Turing Test—Alan Turing’s proposal that a computer could be said to think if its...
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Binary search in the Old Testament
The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord. (NIV Proverbs 16:33) …“Lux et Veritas”… Seal of Yale University image from Wikimedia Commons. The seal of Yale University shows a...
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Whence function notation?
I begin — in continental style, unmotivated and, frankly, gratuitously — by defining Ackerman’s function \(A\) over two integers: \[ A(m, n) = \left\{ \begin{array}{l} n + 1 & \mbox{ if $m=0$ } \\...
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WWHD?
…personal role model… Image of Harry Lewis courtesy of Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences This past Wednesday, April 19, was a celebration of computer science at...
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Moderating principles
Some time around April 1994, I founded the Computation and Language E-Print Archive, the first preprint repository for a subfield of computer science. It was hosted on Paul Ginsparg’s arXiv platform,...
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