A little bit of advice please.

[Matt]

All I can say is, you pick some good heroes! Congrats on the new-old Moved as well!

It's a bit more complicated than that. He was amazing in all sorts of ways and his work that led up to the Church Turing Thesis was as important as Russell's Principia. Personally I think his work on Enigma is hugely overstated and makes a team effort look like a personality cult - certainly his work on universal machines was important but the first breakthrough was Polish and shared selflessly - without them I'm not sure we'd have had enough to go on. Where he influential to me was more in the negative: his thoughts on AI and consciousness were, I think, completely wrong headed and pushed AI - and especially the ethics of AI in a really unwise and unhelpful direction that I've spent a chunk of my life objecting to. It's Turing's fault that when most people say AI, they really mean artificial selves and that we developed GLIs without thinking how they might be applied. AI is really the study of anything that require intelligence when done by humans and should have prepared us for machines doing it better than we could imagine.

However, quite coincidentally, as a young postgrad I helped organise the Turing 90 conference, chaired a couple of papers and had my intellectual world turned upside down by Paul and Patricia Churchland after they convinced me not to believe in beliefs in exchange for some light babysitting!

So he's definitely a hero and I have a very soft spot, for him (and AI conferences honouring him) but it's a complex relationship...

[Matt]

Incidently, 0D3, did I ever show you this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-GX5TORdBg

[rodia77]

Congrats, Matt.
It would be cool to have the very same model, but I think it's even cooler to have something similar but different.