Alan Turing was born June 23rd, 1912.
During his short life he invented the stored program computer, became the first computational biologist and made contributions to cryptography that significantly shortened the conflict of WWII. In terms of the social impact of science, his contribution to the 20th Century is paralleled by few others, perhaps Einstein alone. Alan Turing's contribution changed everything, for everyone. No one is untouched by it.
Few of us are given the opportunity to make such a contribution, fewer still the opportunity and the ability to succeed. Alan Turing's vision of computation, machine intelligence and related questions pervade all scientific disciplines. He addressed questions as relevant to Logicians as they are Biologists and Neurophysiologists:
"The whole thinking process is still rather mysterious to us, but I believe that the attempt to make a thinking machine will help us greatly in finding out how we think ourselves." Alan Turing, 1951.
We will be celebrating Alan Turing's birthday and his visionary spirit with some cake at Stanford University tomorrow from 3:00-5:00 in the Gates Fujitsu Lounge (4th Floor).
Please join us.
With respect,
Steven Ericsson-Zenith
Program Chair, Challenging Turing 2012 (http://challengingturing.org)
on behalf of the Organizing Committee.
--
Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith
Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering
http://senses.info
