May 12, 2012 by kintali

Turing Centennial Celebration – Day 3

Welcome to Day 3 proceedings of Turing Centennial Celebration. See also Day 1 and Day 2.

David Harel’s talk titled “Standing on the Shoulders of a Giant”

An entertaining musical video about Turing test

Avi Wigderson’s tak titled “The Hardness of Proving Computational Hardness”. It is always exciting to watch Avi’s talks.

Avi says “Easiness and Hardness are two sides of the same Mobius strip”.

Shafi Goldwasser’s talk titled “Pseudo Deterministic Algorithms”

Bob Tarjan’s talk titled “Search Tree Mysteries”.

Dick Lipton’s talk titled “What Would Turing Be Doing Today?”. As usual Dick’s talk is very entertaining. So I took more pictures.

“Making Projectors work” is a grand challenge 🙂

Birds vs Frogs

End of Dick’s talk

Christos Papadimitriou’s talk titled “The Origin of Computable Numbers”. Amazing talk comparing Turing and Darwin.

The three day Turing Centennial celebration comes to an end 😦

May 11, 2012 by kintali

Turing Centennial Celebration – Day 2

Welcome to Day 2 proceedings of Turing Centennial Celebration. Click here for yesterday’s events. Thanks to a comment of Noman, live VIDEO is also available.

Martin Davis talks about “Universality is Ubiquitous”. The following slide is from Turing’s 1947 Lecture to the London Mathematical Society.

James Murray starts his talk titled “Mathematical Biology, Past, Present and Future: from animal coat patterns to brain tumors to saving marriages”

Now I understand “How the leopard gets its spots ?”

Barbara Liskov’s talk titled “Programming the Turing Machine”.

Tom Mitchell’s talk titled “Never-Ending Language Learning”. The following slide has a quote of Alan Turing, “What we want is a machine that can learn from experience”.

Andrew Odlyzko’s talk titled “Turing and the Riemann zeta function”.

Ron Rivest’s talk titled “The Growth of Cryptography”

Getting ready for dinner

Books about Alan Turing

Andrew Appel talking about “Turing, Gödel, and Church at Princeton in the 1930s”. This is an inspiring talk about the history of the origins of computing and programming languages at Princeton in 1930s.

Waiting for the screening of the movie “Breaking the Code“

Jack Emery, producer of the movie talking about his inspiration behind making “Breaking the Code“

Beginning of the movie “Breaking the Code“.

I expected this movie to be a slow documentary. But it exceeded all my expectations. It has sharp dialogues, slick editing and top-notch performances.
Here is a sample of a mathematical conversation

Here is another sample

That’s all for today. Tune in tomorrow for Day 3 proceedings.

May 10, 2012 by kintali

Turing Centennial Celebration – Day 1

Let me start this post with a couple of Turing Machine jokes I made up.

How many Turing machines does it take to change a lightbulb ? Just one. Turing machines can simulate each other.

A Turing machine walks into a bar. The bartender asks “what would you like to order”. Turing machine says “I am still deciding”.

As you already know, 2012 is the Year of Turing. Here at Princeton University we are celebrating this occasion from May 10 to 12. For a quick overview of the role of Princeton in the origins of computing watch the following video :

This post is a live blog of the events.

Les Valiant’s talk titled “Computer Science as a Natural Science”. I like the following slide saying “Darwin was a computer Scientist. Turing was a natural scientist“

Andy Yao’s talk titled “Quantum Computing: A Great Science in the Making”. He says “Quantum Computers are coming sooner than you think. Coming soon to a store near you“.

Robert Kahn is starting his talk titled “A Systems Approach to Managing Distributed Information”. Among the Turing Award winners invited to this celebration, he is the only one from industry.