Alan Turing: Crash Course Computer Science #15
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- čas přidán 6. 06. 2017
- Today we’re going to take a step back from programming and discuss the person who formulated many of the theoretical concepts that underlie modern computation - the father of computer science himself: Alan Turing. Now normally we try to avoid “Great Man" history in Crash Course because truthfully all milestones in humanity are much more complex than just an individual or through a single lens - but for Turing we are going to make an exception. From his theoretical Turing Machine and work on the Bombe to break Nazi Enigma codes during World War II, to his contributions in the field of Artificial Intelligence (before it was even called that), Alan Turing helped inspire the first generation of computer scientists - despite a life tragically cut short.
Special thanks to Contributing Writer Robert Xiao whom we should have (and forgot) to include in the credits. His help with this episode was invaluable.
Ps. Have you had the chance to play the Grace Hopper game we made in episode 12. Check it out here! thoughtcafe.ca/hopper/
Produced in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios: / pbsdigitalstudios
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If only the world treated him better than the gifts he gave us.
Mike Oxsbigg Aww man this comment got me for some reason
Imagine what more he could have done for the world if he were not mistreated.
Sameopet He was looking for patterns in nature near the end.
+
Some stars do go out :(
TIL CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart."
🤹♂️
TIL TIL stands for Today I've Learned
JARVIS Just A Very Intelligent System
@@TheDeadEyeSamurai That says JAVIS my guy
On his last days he got interested in biology and shape patterns in nature. We will always wonder if he would had come up with another breakthrough idea from that.
AleAlejandro this is really sad
Actually, he wrote a great paper on the subject.
He finished his first paper on the subject the day before he went to prison, its worth a read.
He was such a wonderful, great, and brilliant man. RIP Alan Turing
And that was my 12.354 failed attempt to understand a Turing Machine.
12 attempts is not that bad, better luck next time!
12354 attempts is a lot; some countries use . as , and , as . Instead of 12-point-five, you'd have 12,5 and instead of twelve thousand three hundred, you'd have 12.300.
this was my 283rd attempt.
she just gave an example with a simplified ruleset....imagine if you expanded the ruleset to simulate all the instructions that a modern cpu can execute, what you'd get is a (theoretical) machine capable of executing everything a modern computer can execute. the point of the turing machine is to prove the viability of such a system of computation - that by reading symbols sequentially and manipulating them according to a set of rules, you can compute pretty much anything
Crash course videos go too fast.
Thank you for mentioning the story on Turing's sexuality and how he was treated. It's a hugely important part of how we know him today. It's also worth mentioning that in 2013 the Alan Turning law was passed in the UK clearing all records of those charged with homosexual offences
Paul Watson actually, it only allowed them to be cleared if they applied to be cleared. We didn't get the full automatic pardon until this year.
Gg I just got gofed
@@benjaminshort587 well he would've done way more and we would've been more advanced if he was respected for his sexuality, that's why we should tell his story.
I'm crying just to hear about the sad ending of Turing. Feel so sorry for how humanity lost such a brilliant scientist!
"Sometimes it's the people no one imagines anything of, who do the things no one can imagine." - Alan Turing
I'm a simple guy. I see Alan Turing, I give a like.
Please do get started on Crash Course Math.
No do crash course meth
Kriso de la Erikejo I don't know why but this seems funny. Anyway you can checkout PatrickJMT.
He is amazing at maths
Crash course math already exists. It's the fundamentals series by 3blue1brown.
+Kriso de la Erikejo Isn't that such a broad topic? The field of mathematics is taught for years at school, so it might be too big to fit into a crash course series. That being said, I'd want it to exist but this is a major hindrance
Gabriel francis Same goes for Physics, Chemistry and Biology.
The amazing thing about the halting problem (and everything that follows from it) is that it makes computer science one of the few disciplines of science that can determine its own boundaries.
I thought you weren't going to mention his tragic story of how he was forced to have chemical treatments for being gay and he took his life tragically, unable to cope with this treatment. This is a story I believe everyone should know: A gay man is responsible for winning World War Two and saving millions of lives in the process. So hounded for being gay he took his life, and sadly this story is not common to the history curriculum. Imagine how many little gay boys, like myself who went to school under section 28, would have felt if they had learnt that a gay man is responsible for defeating the Nazis and saving the lives of many of their grandparents.
It is also testament to the beauty and power of love that it was the death of his first love, a boy at his school, Christopher Morcom, that inspired him.
Be nice to people, you never know they might fall in love with you and grow up to save the world.
Is it really necessary to mention his sexuality every single time he comes up in conversation? Seriously, how is that progressive?
The homophobia he faced was truly astounding. I mean, it was WWII, but still. Interestingly, though, there was some question about his death: he was running an experiment at the time that involved the use of cyanide, which he may have inhaled; the apple they thought was poisoned was never tested, and he often left half-eaten apples by his bedside; and he had made plans for the work he was going to do when he got back. Therefore the options are either he killed himself after horrifying treatment at the hands of those he saved, or he died accidentally after braving said horrifying treatment, and those he saved didn't actually put in the effort to look into it much. Two really, really sad possibilities for someone who should've been praised in his time and who never should've faced what he had to face just because of who he was.
+aperson22222 It is progressive in a way that it teaches people a very basic yet very important lesson of "not judging a book by its cover". So that next time, when a genius is born and he/she happens to have some quirks that isn't represented or accepted by general society of the time (such as homosexuality), then people will think twice about their hurtful actions. Alan Turing could've possibly contributed more to computer science by today had it not been the unfortunate circumstances that others placed on him then. Who knows, maybe today's computing might've been more advanced than what we have now.
I still hold Christianity and any religion responsible for the actions done in their name in the past thousands of years.
It's when you stop mentioning the evils done in the past, when they are often repeated.
The way you simplify concepts without oversimplifying them is simply brilliant! Thank you for giving us such a great course!
I totally did not know that CAPTCHA's were Turing tests. I guess I'm a computer then.
Thank you for bringing in Alan Turing's history, and the circumstances of his life and death. This sort of thing was not discussed when I took a computer science course in school 18 years ago, and while I doubt it would've inspired me to the point that I found that computer programming was the thing for me, it would've at least helped me feel more like I was part of society. Even knowing that he was persecuted for who he was, knowing that it's not like that anymore, and having a recent historic example of a gay man doing something important and good would have given me a different outlook for my final years of high school.
"So pretty simple right?"
Me: gives up on life 😔
What if I say that I just watched The Imitation Game an hour before?
PS : Congratulations CrashCourse on reaching 6 million subscribers.
Keep inspiring :)
Mr IY Worst depiction of Turing ever.
That movie was hardly about computing and all about how gay he was. Dumb movie.
sugarfrosted "The realisation after you watch CrashCourse"
Apparently that film is almost entirely fiction, and effectively slanders people who collaborated with Turing by portraying them as his enemies. Learning that really put me off it.
You should rember that a lot of facts from imitation game are LIES, because Enigma was broken by Poles two times (the second one when Germans improved coding). Turing didn't done it. Just write in google "BOMBA ENIGMA". This part of history was just a lie (until 2014 when Britain officialy told that polish scientists did it)
We all need to learn the lessons of history... how much more could Alan Turing have done if he had lived longer, had lived in modern times and been accepted as a genius gay man? How many others were ignored or passed over because they were not born into the right kind of family, were not seen as socially acceptable, were the wrong colour, gender etc? How many people currently work in menial jobs overlooked by decision makers, their insight, knowledge and experience ignored? Alan Turing was not an easy person to work with, he was both misunderstood and disliked, that is not uncommon for a genius. The world would be a better place if we all took a little more time and effort and learned to appreciate those around us.
He was not disliked, his colleagues loved him and he was a very nice and sweet man. I believe you are basing that off of the slanderous movie "The Imitation Game" which portrays him as an insufferable twat, which he wasn't. It's quite an insult to his former friends that are depicted as "enemies" for some dramatic tension in the movie. Additionally, half of the movie is regarded as pure fiction if you look at the scene by scene analysis, don't remember the web site but it gave it a 41% realism score.
@@aidancollins1591 it's true. he was actually recorded as pretty charming according to actual historical documents. Hollywood is just obsessed with making intelligent people look 'awkward and damaged'.
The Imitation Game is a fantastic movie, but has a lot of inaccuracies about what Alan Turing was like as a person. Makes me sad that people think of him the way the movie portrayed him
I have not done much research into Turing myself, but have recently watched The Imitation Game. Could you tell me how his true character differed from its portrayal in the film?
CocoOwnzU the film portrayed him as being autistic and socially inept, not really sure why because from what I've read, he was pretty normal and sociable, despite being 'eccentric'
He could have made significant advances in what we know in computer science today if not for homophobia. SMH. It just annoys me that ones personal preferences can be judged and ridiculed even up to this day.
Human nature.
Hate that which you do not understand, fear the unknown. Safety in comformity and expect the worst.
The world did not deserve Alan.
I actually wouldn't mind a CrashCourse Mathematics series. You guys should get Danica McKellar on that.
"also demonstrated that Half-Life3 can exist"
can.
not will.
Large Dog Thank God somebody mentioned it.
theoretically can = will if given infinite amount of time
Half Life Alyx was revealed friends :)
@@lostpockets2227 sadly, it's more like half-life 1.5
Lovely movie, The Imitation Game
Parth Datar the book is better
Lovely movie, The Imitation Game.
I enjoyed the movie, but it's so historically inaccurate that it's basically just fiction. There's very little that they got right.
Apparently it's extremely inaccurate though. And effectively slanders real people who collaborated with Turing by portraying them as his enemies. Learning that really put me off it.
Regicidal Maniac it is a movie about what would to most people be a boring movie so they had to make it more interesting, but I still agree with you that it is not very accurate
It's actually unbelievable how he was treated considering his contribution to society.
RIP Sir Alan Turing, your contribution has changed the world.
To any friends in the UK (or visiting) get yourself over to Bletchley Park - the national museum of computing is on the same site, too. It's not expensive. You can learn lots about Turing and the war effort, and see lots of artefacts in the museum as well as explore the park itself. You can stand in the very room the colossus was built / operated in, and see a real working colossus, followed by many other computers throughout history. You can also see a working re-creation of Turings Bombe!
all geniuses aren't appreciated in their time because they are so far ahead of it.
For the first time in series, I couldnt't grasp the essence of a concept, the concept told between 2:00 and 7:20. Thank you for the huge effort
It took me about 3 days to wrap my head around the solution to the Halting problem. It's so elegant! Amazing work from those two giants. 👏👏👏
Just spent 10 minutes understanding Bizarro and it was the best 10 minutes I've had all day.
"Of course, the German military wasn't sharing their Enigma settings on social media..." Ouch! That was an unexpectedly epic burn :)
A concise and succinct video to know almost everything you need about Alan Turing for the general audience.
This series is one or my favourite parts of my week
Including the discussion about what happened to Alan Turing was very important and I'm glad you did it.
However, "hormone treatment" is a pretty conservative name for chemical castration. What he went through was horrible and should be discussed using the appropriate language. Watering it down to make it sound like he took some pills which made him feel a bit weird is not really appropriate.
"hormonal treatment to suppress his sexuality" describes it just fine. That's literally what it was, and it's a more accurate way to refer to it than "chemical castration", which is ambiguous and misleading if you aren't already familiar with the "treatment", if you can call it that. It sounds way more extreme, I get that, because it _is_ an extreme thing to do to a person, but I don't think that it's any more accurate of a term. Plus, it invokes imagery that's probably a bit inappropriate for PBS, given that there's an alternative, arguably more sensible way to refer to it.
They didn't say he took some pills that "made him feel a bit weird". They say he took hormones which "altered his mood and personality", and then he killed himself. The way they address it here is pretty direct and succinct, and they make no effort to defend what his government did to him. I think they handled it well.
this is so aesthetically pleasing
Thank you for talking about Turing's life!!
'not-quite-Benedict-Cumberbatch-lookalike' xD
good stuff as ever, keep it up!
Would it be possible to do more expose pieces like this and the Grace Hopper video? I love learning about the people who laid the foundation for modern computing!
Like a whole course on notable figures in computer history.
I'd totally recommend Computerphile for this sort of thing. They also have a whole bunch else in a similar vein, but they definitely have stuff from the gods of early computing & their colleagues.
i love your videos on computer science as i studied IT at college
11:17 her eyes are blinking red
THANK YOU!!!! That was wonderfully done. Alan Turing, is a hero.
This little facts, like CAPTCHA always blow my mind! Thank you, Crash Cours it is very interesting!
I have to admit that this is one of the most enjoyable but also most difficult topic of Crash Course ever !!!!!
Cried after watching the movie😢
This episode is fantastic.
I wish i had this video to watch when we were studying the turing machine in my systems theory class!
love all the side-quips. It's great to see that you enjoy the topic that you're teaching. :-)
11:16 Don't believe we didn't notice that.
The robot hegemony is upon us!!!
So Comprehensive :) Thanks for her flawless explanation aided with graphics for us to easily visualize .. This is what I badly wanted all my life .,, The stage I started reading text books without pictures .. I less enjoyed studies!!
Thank you lot for Crash Course Team .. You people have done a wonderful job :)
I am actually studying information and system technology, so I'm very familiar with those themes. But your Videos are super great, super fun... I love watching them.
Thank you for making Videos.
My face melted trying to understand!
I've watched this series from the start and I'm not a student or a programmer. Just a regular guy. I find it fascinating.
markov chains is also a model of algorithmic procedures (equivalent to that of turing machines ). also the reasoning behind the church turing thesis is that the strangest models of algorithmic procedures at the time were equivalent and thus we are assuming that the vague notion of the algorithm can be expressed mathematically by any of these models.
Your videos are awesome, keep up the good work.
pls pls pls carry on this course and do stuff about networks too because it's on my gcse spec haha, love it so far
My prayers have been answered this is all ive ever wanted in life tbh!
This man inspired me so much
2:46 Reminds me of state tables for finite state machines from digital design class
Great! One of the entertainment highlights of my week, and I've been a professional programmer for years!
Same here! I look forward to it as well.
Do you Freelance? or you have a job?
Oldschool I have a job but freelancing is definitely an option these days, if you're considering a career?
Robin Williams I am still learning, but I want to freelance and then eventually get a job
Oldschool Good stuff, well I'd suggest taking a recognized qualification, but these days experience is also valued highly (I speak as someone who interviews developers). The basics covered here are an excellent place to start. It's surprising how many programmers these days lose sight of these basics and end up writing inefficient code. If I were you, I'd start doing websites for friends and family, programs for yourself, apps, anything really as long as it helps you to feel comfortable with programming. Also in the future, machine learning will be a strong subject to have. She said she's going to cover this later in the series. Good luck!
Yeay! Alan Turing. He and Ada Lovelace are my favourites.
Good Work, I love the way of explain
I can't understand half of it but it's amazing
I TOOK MY COMPUTING GCSE TODAY YOU SAVED ME THANKS!!!!
Stupid bigots caused this man to take his own life. Shameful.
No, evil.
Best outro yet!!! :0
Well done, thank you.
i literally finished The Imitation Game and came to look up this guy. I am so fascinated wow
That scene where Alan said that he took up hormonal therapy ,it was heartbreaking
11:16 Nice nod to Bladerunner!
11:57 Red eyes. Watch out people. Also, I know there was so much more to be fascinated by in this episode but what Captcha stands for was far more mind-blowing. I always thought it came from "catching" a robot red handed.
That Bizarro problem is a lot like Gödel's proof that there is no complete, flawless formal systems.
Finally! He should have gotten more attention and appreciation than he did.
Crash course is awesome.
I still have no idea how Turing Machines work...BUT he's great soo that's good enought for me!
Thank you
so for the Turing machine, this device has at least 2 memory modules the state and the infinity long tape, read write head, and processing rules module associating with 2 memory modules.
The Halting Problem sounds a lot like Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem
Math build apon itself continuously...
They are both related.
You guys should have a Turing machine on the shelf!
Thanks for everything, Allen Turing! Happy pride month!
The Imitation Game MUST watch
Perhaps an episode on John von Neumann's contributions to computer science is also in order?
Videos 13 & 14 already solved the Church-Turing thesis already.
To get the turing award you need to make a turing complete that can pass the turing test. Now I need a turing break.
Crash Course Maths 3:28... 🤔
Sounds mouthwatering!
Hope you have a video on von Neumann, too - that'd be nice.
Love you Carrie Anne!!
do a course on cryptography!
Akshay Apte +
I f**king love this movie, he imitation game. Thanks for making a video about him 😊
Fil Martin Same
Fil Martin I agree that it's an enjoyable film, I just wish that more people know that it's so historically inaccurate that it's basically fiction.
Regicidal Maniac You're right but that's how the film industry 'fine tunes' the story for the masses.
Regicidal Maniac oh, my life is a lie
We should rember that a lot of facts from imitation game are lies, because Enigma was broken by Poles two times (the second one when Germans improved coding). Just write in google "Bomba Enigma Machine". This part of history was a lie (until 2014 when Britain officialy agreed that polish scientists broke enigma)
YES !!!! CRASHCOURSE MATH!!!
He single-handedly decrypted the German communications code. What a WW2 hero.
Hi, this is very nice course. I wonder, are you gonna talk about Claude Shannon´s theoretical contribution as well?? Regards
This video
my head
i Just ran 2 miles And I came back to relax and learn programing
Is the Turing machine still used as a "learning" tool in University?
I almost got kicked out of the bachelor program because I could not answer the exam question in a way that please the assistants. Next year, my result were even lower, like if I unlearned.
The third attempt was critical as failing again would prevent me to get a diploma, even if I was working as embedded software engineer for years and was getting good grades. I got lucky this time because the creator of that class, the one who tough that Turing machine would be the best way to introduce basic logic concepts was a friendly man. He realized that a good student was going to fail because of the way his creation was used by other teachers.
He lent me a box that he was keeping in his office for years. It contained each version of exam he wrote and the solution he presented to his students. I spent my evening and weekends revising all these documents.
I could see how the questions evolved over the years in order to confuse students who would cheat by memorizing the answers. Year after year, the questions were tweaked slightly so that new students could not blindly copy the answers from previous years. The net result was an incredible mess of convoluted wording. The original intent of learning from Turing machine general concepts was lost in all these trickeries.
I was the first to complete the exam and leave the class as I knew each questions, which kind of proof they expected beside giving the correct answer. Despite answering exactly like the creator of the class was doing, the lazy correctors marked this or that as incomplete... giving me barely enough to pass. I was happy to escape this nightmare.
Alan Turing, sure, was a genius. But the Turing machine didn't help me in any way. I preferred much more other similar subject such as the algorithm to convert a recursive function to loop/table driven method. Or the ladder language used in industrial controllers which execute sequential logic without ever blocking in an infinite loop. Hash tables, memory allocation that never get fragmented are other example of advanced concepts which proved more useful than the Turing machine.
I'm very disturbed by that story. They should teach this in school. We read the Kite Runner, kids can handle this kind of stuff.
hero
7:00 Sounds like it's related to Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
Hey, I was wondering if anyone can explain how a microwave is Turing complete? Is it because it can receive inputs and change state? I thought I understood the idea of a Turing completeness but now I'm not so sure.
CrashCourse math, please. I'm about to start tutoring at my college, I'll be one of two.
Heart breaking..