Friday, December 26, 2014

when a name is an adjective

Alright, I've just made it home from seeing the film "The Imitation Game" and some of my confusion regarding the use of Alan Turing's surname as an adjective has been alleviated. It didn't make sense to me for the longest time because it can mean two different things depending upon the context just as the term Boolean which comes from George Boole can mean two different things, namely and/or/not in 3D graphics or true/false in variables in code. I was building my own little theory that Turing meant "of cryptography" but it doesn't mean that at all as it turns out. In the case of a Turing machine, the machine is a computer. It's that simple. Turing machines are not the subset of all machines which are "of cryptography" but instead, more plainly, they are the subset of all machines which are computers. This is stated outright in the end notes of the movie I just saw. The other, different case is one of a Turing test which is a test to see if a subject is a person or a machine based upon interactions with it, the subject. There is some talk of these sorts of tests in the movie and I recalled another movie, Blade Runner, in which Harrison Ford's character gives Sean Young's character such a test and deduces that she is a machine.

Later on in the film, Sean Young, disillusioned, depressed, and realizing that she is a machine, turns around and asks Harrison Ford if he has ever given himself his own test heavily implying something! WAS DECKARD A REPLICANT? Meh, I digress.

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