[DonHopkins]

A Pentium chip would probably seem like an incomprehensible material to Alan Turing (and not just because of the awful instruction set), because even though all the materials were known at the time, the design and fabrication techniques and mind-bogglingly fine granularity and complexity of how they are combined hadn't been conceived of yet.

I agree the reporters probably flubbed the word "alloy" for lack of a better understanding of science or a better term to describe it.

An integrated circuit is a fine grained combination of several different kinds of metal and other materials, but they're meticulously arranged and sandwiched together, not just melted together into an alloy.

At what point do you draw the line between nanotechnology and alloy, when you have the technology to 3d-print each and every atom?

[krapp]

>I agree the reporters probably flubbed the word "alloy" for lack of a better understanding of science or a better term to describe it.

There's no mention of what properties these materials are supposed to have, much less that the materials seem so exotic as to be beyond comprehension or a more accurate description. The original New York Times article merely mentions the "storage of metal alloys and other materials..."

"Alloys" may literally just mean "alloys."

[sandworm101]

Turing could see the recognizable structure and after probing it a while would quickly work out its function. He would understand all the bits and pieces and almost instantly speculate on how it was manufactured. Something alien would be more akin to showing Plato a laser pointer. Plato could spend a lifetime poking at it without learning much of anything. That's the sort of material they would need to lock up.

[fjsolwmv]

You think Alan Turing wouldn't be able to use a microscope?

[rgbrenner]

It depends on what how old Turing was... if it's 20 year old Turing -- an electron microscope wasn't invented yet... so no, he couldn't use one to see all of the structures of a CPU.. just the larger structures visible with an optical microscope (limited to ~200nm (Rayleigh criteron) but I dont know if they had the lens manufacturing good enough back then to reach that limit)... which may not be enough for him to figure it out.

Edit: And even when he died in the 1954, electron microscopes werent that advanced... we still needed to invent new techniques, improve our lens manufacturing, etc. There were a lot of shortcomings with it back then that limited its usage. So even in his later years, I wonder how much detail he could actually see on a modern CPU.

[DonHopkins]

Of course he could, but unless you told him you were a time traveler from the future, or the Germans had vastly superior secret technology they hadn't deployed yet, it would be so unlike the computers of his time that it probably wouldn't seem plausible that it was what he knew of as a computer.

[sitkack]

So many quotables in this thread. I thank experience and brown liquor.