I just criticized Danny Boyle for missing the golden opportunity of including Alan Turing in the Olympic opening ceremony. However, he deserves praise for the accuracy with which Sir Tim Berners-Lee was presented. As the loop above shows Berners-Lee is using a NeXTcube computer, just like the one on which he famously programmed the world's first web server at CERN.
The NeXTcube was in 1990 a powerful workstation created by NeXT Inc., the company that Steve Jobs formed in 1985 after he was forced out of Apple. The NeXTcube featured an object-oriented operating system called NeXTSTEP, which unlike the hardware, was highly influential. In fact Jobs was brought back into Apple when it acquired NeXT for the operating system, which is still at the core of OS X and iOS. All this history is described in more detail in several chapters in The Universal Machine.
What a missed opportunity. Alan Turing's legacy could have been placed central stage in front of a global audience of more than a billion people during the Olympics opening ceremony at the weekend. Sure Tim Berners-Lee was named for inventing the web, but he couldn't have done it without Turing's invention of the computer. Had Danny Boyle, the opening ceremony's director, asked Sir Berners-Lee, who's famously modest, I'm sure he'd have wanted Turing to get the recognition and not himself.
There's even a direct Olympic connection with Turing who tried out for the British Olympic team in 1948, the last time the games were held in London. His best marathon time was 2 hours 46 minutes, that was competitive in 1948 and is still a very respectable time. A genius scientist, codebreaker and athlete, what's not to celebrate!
How apt, a photo of the Olympic torch be passed on at the Turing statue in Manchester on Turing's birthday. Not just because it was the centenary of Turing's birth but also because he was a very keen long distance runner - he even tried out for the 1948 British Olympic marathon team. He was carrying an injury at the time and didn't make the cut.
However, as you can see in the photo above, from Turing's race number he was anticipating Twitter.
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| Alan Turing running |
The Olympic Torch will meet Alan Turing twice as it relays around Britain this summer. First on Saturday 23rd June when it goes through Manchester city centre and passes Turing's statue on Sackville St. and then on Monday 9th of July when it will visit Bletchley Park where Turing led a team of code-breakers in cracking the Nazi Enigma codes.
This is very fitting since not only is it the centenary of Turing's birth but he was also an Olympic class long distance runner with a best time of 2 hours 46 minutes for the marathon. He even tried out for a place in Britains' Olympic team in 1948 when Britain last hosted the Olympics. He only came fifth in the trials, it's believed because he was carrying an injury. It was even suggested that the London Olympic Marathon be called the Alan Turing Marathon in his honour, which I thought was a great idea.
Isn't it interesting to consider that Turing had an outstanding mind in an outstanding body - clearly an example of mens sana in corpore sano.
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| The iCub Robot |
A robot has been nominated to carry the 2012 London Olympic torch to commemorate the centenary of Alan Turing's birth. It's not certain if the robot, called iCub, will actually carry the Olympic flame, but there's no reason why it couldn't. The Next Web has an article on this.
The idea of commemorating the centenary of Alan Turing's birth by naming the marathon at the London Olympics in 2012 "The Alan Turing Marathon", isn't such a daft idea after all.
John Graham-Cumming, who led the succesful campaign last year to have the British PM offer an apology for the way Alan Turing was treated by authorities, is now trying achieve this new goal.
Turns out that Turing was not just a brilliant mathematician and the father of computing but a strong marathon runner - 2 hours 46 minutes seems like an excellent time for a marathon.
John Graham-Cumming can be contacted via his blog http://blog.jgc.org/
