A couple of papers by Alan Turing have appeared on the arXiv.
No, that’s right – The Applications of Probability to Cryptography and The Statistics of Repetitions are two papers Turing wrote during the Second World War, and they’re now available on the arXiv, transcribed into modern LaTeX by Ian Taylor.
I just want to be done with Alan Turing posts, but stuff keeps happening. Here’s a very brief round-up of some recent Turing news:
There’s a petition to Pardon all convicted gay men, not just Alan Turing. Sign it or don’t or write 12,000 words hemming and hawing about it all. Up to you.
This is actually really interesting: some “Banbury sheets”, invented by Alan Turing to make breaking naval Enigma codes go quicker (here’s some more info on how that works by Tony Sale) have been found stuffed in the roof of Hut 6 at Bletchley Park.
The UK government is putting together a mega-huge new Alan Turing Institute for Data Science, combining support from all sorts of universities and research organisations. The Guardian tells us that it’s going to be based at the British Library in London, while the Manchester Evening News laments that the University of Manchester, where Turing worked after the war, has not been selected to be an official part of the Institute.
Since we’re the leading authority on Alan Turing news stories, and since it’s clear that anything is improved by the addition of LASERS, we’re proud to report that the Manchester Histories Festival, taking place across Manchester on March 21-28, will include LASER ALAN TURING.
The centrepiece of the festival will be a laser light show at MediaCity in Salford, playing throughout the festival; it will include a ‘thank you’ message to Alan Turing, in morse code, by artist Craig Morrison, and involves two mile laser beams. The Histories Festival says:
The art is a tribute to the impact he continues to have on how we live today in a digitally connected world.
Laser light spectacular to pay tribute to Alan Turing at festival at the Manchester Evening News
Thank you event page
Here’s a roundup of some news stories that slipped past our highly trained news snipers.