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I'm curious, was the crime Turing was convicted of actually called "homosexuality," or was it called "gross indecency and sexual perversion"? -- Janet Davis
The crime was "gross indecency and sexual perversion."
-- The Cunctator
The MacTutor biography linked in the article mentions blackmail as reason for his going to the police. Is there a reference to a more precise biography on the web? --AxelBoldt
For precision and accuracy, go to www.turing.org.uk, Andrew Hodges' site. Unfortunately, he doesn't really discuss the trial in detail on the site, leaving the complicated story for his definitive book, Alan Turing: the Enigma. Suffice it to say there was an element of threatened blackmail, but it wasn't really about revealing that Turing was gay, and didn't really figure into the course of events. Basically, once the police got involved in Alan Turing's affairs (so to speak) for reasons that had little to nothing to do with homosexuality, they quickly discovered his homosexuality (he told them) and arrested him for it. The MacTutor biography has a lot of misleadingness. We should email Andrew Hodges (andrew@synth.co.uk) to see if he's willing to contribute his encyclopedic entry ([1] (http://www.turing.org.uk/publications/routledge.html)) to here or Nupedia.
-- The Cunctator
I hate to admit this, but I had to look up 'larceny' in the dictionary. Is that really a conventional word? -- JanHidders
- Larceny is a form of theft, where property is taken unlawfully. The distinction between larceny and burglary is that in larceny the perpetrator does have lawful access to the property, but no lawful right to remove it (burglary involved an act of trespass as well as theft). Police officers are authorised to confiscate the possessions of people they have arrested, but must keep them in a specific location and return all the possessions when incarceration ends (unless a court orders otherwise). Keeping any of the possessions constitutes larceny. Embezzlement dffers in that the perpetrator has the right to remove the property for specific purposes, but removes the property for some other, unauthorised purpose. Larceny is a standard term in criminal law.
"he proved that there was no solution to the Entscheidungsproblem, also known in computer science as the halting problem."
That's not true. While any instance of the halting problem can be transformed into the Entscheidungsproblem, that makes
the halting problem a "subset", if you like, of the Entscheidungsproblem rather than its equivalent (Robert Merkel <rgmerk at mira dot net>)
Well, the "also known in cs as the halting problem" is oversimplified, I agree. However, it is true that Turing showed that the Entscheidungsproblem is unsolvable by reducing it to the Halting problem, so in a sense the two problems are equivalent. --AxelBoldt
Where's the debate about his death? Anything other than suicide is terribly improbable. --The Cunctator
- The cause of his death was debated from the beginning. Claiming it was "almost certainly" suicide is not a NPOV. NPOV now reflects both attributed causes of death.
The only ones who doubted that it was suicide at the time were his mother and others close to him who didn't want to believe it. It was ruled a suicide by the coroner, and very few objective people have any reason to doubt that. --LDC
- "others close to him", in other words those best in the position to know his motivations? Homosexuality was seen as a negative attribute by the government at that time. The coroners report may have taken an easy out i.e. "oh, he was homosexual, it must have been suicide".
No, the coroner ruled it a suicide because he was found holding a half-eaten apple that was pretty clearly coated with a significant amount of cyanide that couldn't reasonably have been accidental. He was also known to be very depressed about the prosecution and the hormone treatments. And no, I don't think close friends are the best source of info here--suicide is also frowned upon, and some people just don't want to believe the obvious. At any rate, I don't have any problem with the article mentioning that some people doubt the suicide, as long as its clear that the vast majority accept it uncontroversially. --LDC
- No individual on Wikipedia can presume to speak for the "vast majority" regarding an issue which is in dispute.
For God's sake, have you even tried to look up the issue on various sources? I did--most encycopedias simply report it as a suicide without even the slightest mention of controversy. The Turing site itself at
turing.org.uk (http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/bio/part7.html)
says exactly this:
- "He was found by his cleaner when she came in on 8 June 1954. He had died the day before of cyanide poisoning, a half-eaten apple beside his bed. His mother believed he had accidentally ingested cyanide from his fingers after an amateur chemistry experiment, but it is more credible that he had successfully contrived his death to allow her alone to believe this. The coroner's verdict was suicide."
Before you accuse someone of not knowing what the majority opinion on an issue is, you might first look to see if you know what the hell you're talking about.
- The award is frequently referred to as the "Nobel Prize for computer science".
Oh, yeah? How frequent? --Uncle Ed 19:54, 9 Oct 2003 (UTC)
- As a computer engineer, I can tell you first hand - it is called that very, very often. Raul654 15:03, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)
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