[KingOfCoders]

"For example, it was claimed that Turing founded computer science.[...] Turing's 1936 paper provided the "theoretical backbone" for all computers to come."

So your argument is, because it is unclear how to "physically implement the arbitrary-function minimization operator", Turing is the better "theoretical backbone" and has founded computer science?

[jimhefferon]

The question in the air in 36-ish was something like, "OK, clearly we can mechanically compute things like the sum of two numbers or the prime factorization of a number. But are there other things that can be computed with a discrete and deterministic mechanism?" (At the time they called these "effective" functions.)

Church had piles of stuff that he and his students produced that were computable with the lambda calculus. Basically, all of the natural number functions that a person thinks are intuitively mechanically computable, those folks had showed how to lambda compute. With this evidence, he proposed to Godel (they were working together at Princeton at the time), who was considered the world's expert, taking "lambda-calculable" as a mathematically precise version of "mechanically computable." But Godel was notoriously careful, and he did not accept the thought as perfectly clear.

That is, they had a subset of the things that could be mechanically computed. But was it the entire set? Or was there something that some discrete and deterministic mechanism could be made to do that would lead to more than Church's set?

Imagine you are Dedekind and you are looking at the primitive recursive functions and (1) any such function is intuitively mechanically computable, and (2) you are able to work out how to define a pile of things like prime factorization of an integer using this system. You might well conjucture that this is it. But we know (and Godel and Church and Turing knew) that this is not it, that you need to add unbounded search of some kind (this is what minimization does) to get more things that are intuitively mechanically computable.

I agree that the minimization operator is not as easy to picture with gears and levers as some of the other operations. But the issue in 36 was that a person could worry that there was even more. Just as minimization is not as easy to picture and the need for it didn't hit Dedekind with great force, could there be something else out there that we have all missed?

That worry disappeared when Godel read Turing's masterful analysis. It convinced him that this is what a machine can do. He wrote, "That this really is the correct definition of mechanical computability was established beyond any doubt by Turing.'' Church felt the same way, writing that Turing machines have "the advantage of making the identification with effectiveness ... evident immediately.''

[generalizations]

I'm still a little confused. It seems like Turing came up with something that works, and clearly fulfills precisely what Godel and Church and Turing were all looking for; but it also seems like it's a mathematically inelegant solution. Is it possible that in the future we'll find a way to show that Gödel's mu-recursive functions or Church's lambda calculus also precisely describe 'what a machine can do'? If so, it seems that from a mathematical standpoint, either of those would be a better foundation to start from. (I'll totally agree that from a teacher's perspective, the Turing machine is the better explanation.)

[jimhefferon]

> Is it possible

Yes, the set of functions computable with mu recursion, or with lambda calculus, is the same as the set of functions computable with a Turing machine. (Turing in his original paper showed that the set is the same for his system and Church's, and the proofs for mu recursion and many other systems are well-known.)

> I'll totally agree that from a teacher's perspective, the Turing machine is the better explanation.

When I learned this, the instructor did not use Turing machines. They used mu recursion. That has the advantage that you don't first define a machine and then derive the set of functions, instead you go straight to the functions. But I agree that Sipser (which I understand to be the most popular text today) defines a computable function as one that is computed by Turing machine, and to my mind that has the advantage of honestly suggesting to students what they are about.

[generalizations]

Thanks, I think I understand now. I thought there was a distinction between the mathematical idea of what computation is, and the engineering we've invented to implement that computation, and so I didn't really get the significance/literalness of what you were saying about mechanization.

It does seem weird to me though that we're letting our engineering limitations determine how we think about these things mathematically.

[nl]

It's not as simple as engineering limitations determining how we think.

Turing machines do have mathematical advantages in some areas. See this siblings comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28541800

[cybernautique]

I'm convinced that David Harland's Rekursiv[1:] machine _is_ the manner by which lambda et al. might be implemented at the machine level. Unfortunately, Rekursiv seems to have died an ignominious death, with the last Rekursiv chip having fallen off the side of a steamboat (apocrypha; I remember having read this, but I'm unable to find the original citation.)

The Rekursiv advantage is its ability to do recursion on the bare-metal. It's described as an object-oriented architecture. Its memory was a persistent store of objects, with each object having its size, type, and position known in memory.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rekursiv

[Karrot_Kream]

I guess I'm confused as to why this is more than simply an interesting formalism. Complexity theory and models of computation are largely based around the Turing Machine model. Lambda calculus is an effective lens to design programming languages and prove equivalence between programs. We know by way of the Church-Turing Thesis that these two models are equivalent. The Turing Machine model is both better studied from a computation perspective and has much more practical realization; what's the point in creating something like this? It feels a bit like silly lambda calculus fetishism, but again maybe the value here is the actual computation formalism itself.

[cybernautique]

For me, personally, I really like the lambda calculus as a tool to organize and better my computational thinking.

I came into programming/computer science from a mathematics degree; I read some old treatises on recursion theory[1] and fell in love. I couldn't ever quite wrap my head around the Turing Machine formalism, but kept at it for a while. Finding Barendregt's paper [2] was a huge shock! I grasped it much quicker. So, yes, lambda calculus and the Turing Machine formalism are equivalent in explanatory power, but there are also reasons someone might prefer one to the other. So, yes, for me, the value _is_ the formalism.

As to why I think the Rekursiv would provide a good platform for implementing lambda calculus on the bare-metal, that's entirely due to Rekursiv's memory model advantage and the fact that it has a user-writable ISA. Why would someone choose to implement the lambda calculus on bare-metal? You call it "fetishism," I call it fun!

More generally, I just really like the idea of having a machine with a user-writable ISA.

[1] Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective Computability: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2738948M/Theory_of_recursive...

[2] Introduction to Lambda Calculus: https://www.cse.chalmers.se/research/group/logic/TypesSS05/E...

[Karrot_Kream]

FWIW Nothing wrong with having fun with computing, and implementing lambda calculus on bare-metal can be as fun as any other computational exploration, so good on ya!

Thanks for clearing up that it's the formalism you find interesting. Also, to offer a counterpoint, I'm also from a math background, but I was more of an analysis person (as much as one can be in mathematics where it's all related) than an algebra person, and when I did some FP research, it often felt like where all the algebraists go to play computer science. I feel like analysts are underrepresented in PLT (and overrepresented in complexity theory!) but this is already going off-topic, so cheers.

[jecel]

I always mention the Rekursiv in my talk about Smalltalk computers. Its problem was being a CISC in the era of RISC. The Manchester Mushroom from just a little later had initially the same problem but went through a major redesign when they saw the JIT compilers for Self on the Sun Sparc processor.

[cybernautique]

I'd never heard of the Mushroom! Thank you for making me aware of it! A quick DDG search returned no results; I'd appreciate any links you have on the topic!

I'd also love to see your talk! Do you think a RISC Rekursiv could be achieved? What value, if any, do you think such might have in our current world?

[jecel]

This is the current Mushroom page:

http://www.wolczko.com/mushroom/

The slides for my 2019 talk about Smalltalk computers (in LibreOffice and PDF formats):

http://www.merlintec.com/download/2019_slides_jecel_fast1v2....

http://www.merlintec.com/download/2019_slides_jecel_fast1v2....

and the video (1 hour and 13 minutes):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tATpzsyC6OA

If you replace the Rekursiv's special microcode memory with a cache to allow microcode to live in main memory you will essentially have a RISC version of the machine. I have adopted this solution in several of my own designs.

[thom]

Thanks for this link, really interesting stuff. For a while there was a fashion in OS research for orthogonal persistence but this is much deeper and more elegant.

[cybernautique]

Absolutely! As mentioned, I'm very much a novice of computer architecture. It kinda blew my mind that Rekursiv was unique in its abilities. Also fascinating are LISP Machines, which seem to have received quite a bit of love from HN already.

If I may ask, from your perspective, what's more elegant about Rekursiv's design? Is it the philosophy or implementation? I'd also love any links to orthogonal persistence!

[WorldMaker]

That's the central argument in the Church-Turing Theory isn't it? Church felt very strongly that the difference between his and his students' "elegance" and Turing's "practical" was a difference only in abstraction and that the two models were equivalent and translatable (you can write in one abstraction and convert it to the other).

That theory continues to bear fruit as the history of programming languages is almost entirely about bringing new and "better" abstractions to problems and then translating them to "dumber, more practical" machines. We have programming languages today modeled directly off the elegance of (though now sometimes still a few steps removed from being direct implementations of) the lambda calculus and mu-recursive functions, and the amazing thing is that they work great even given how "dumb" and "inelegant" our machines can be in practice.

[acchow]

> Is it possible that in the future we'll find a way to show that Gödel's mu-recursive functions or Church's lambda calculus also precisely describe 'what a machine can do'?

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis

[dwohnitmok]

> we'll find a way to show that Gödel's mu-recursive functions or Church's lambda calculus also precisely describe 'what a machine can do'?

This is already proven to be the case. Mu-recursion (which IIRC is not Godel's general recursive functions, despite what Wikipedia says; Kleene was the originator of the mu operator. Godel's general recursive functions are defined in a separate, but yet again equivalent way that directly extends primitive recursion), Turing machines, and the lambda calculus are all proven to be exactly equivalent to each other. The fact that these three independent approaches to computability are all equivalent is why we have strong informal justification that the Church-Turing Thesis (a non-mathematical statement) holds.

Separately, there's a sentiment that I've seen come up several times on HN that somehow the lambda calculus, mu-recursion, or general recursion is more "mathematical" and Turing machines are less "mathematical."

I want to push back on that. The mathematical field of computability is based almost entirely off of Turing machines because there are many classes of mathematical and logical problems that are easy to state with Turing machines and extremely awkward/almost impossible to state with the lambda calculus and mu-recursion (this is consistent with my previous statement that the three are all equivalent in power because computability theory often deals with non-computable functions, in particular trying to specify exactly how non-computable something is). The notion of oracles, which then leads to a rich theory of things like Turing jumps and the arithmetical hierarchy, is trivial to state with Turing machines and very unwieldy to state in these other formalisms.

Likewise the lambda calculus and mu-recursion (but not general recursion) provide a very poor foundation to do complexity theory in CS. Unlike Turing machines, where it is fairly easy to discern what is a constant time operator, the story is much more complicated for the lambda calculus, where to the best of my knowledge, analyzing complexity in the formalism of the lambda calculus, instead of translating it to Turing machines, is still an open problem.

There is indeed a mathematical elegance to Turing machines that makes it so that most of the mathematics of computability is studied with Turing machines rather than the lambda calculus.

The lambda calculus on the other hand is invaluable when studying programming language theory, but we should not mistake PLT to be representative of the wider field of mathematics or theoretical CS.

EDIT: I should perhaps make clear that if I put on my mathematical hat, mu-recursive functions seem like the most familiar formalism, because they align with a common way families of things are defined in mathematics (specify individual members and then generate the rest through some relationship). However, I would contend that for the majority of mathematicians outside of computability theory, the lambda calculus and Turing machines seem equally "strange."

[earleybird]

In a nutshell, Church asserted effective computability by saying "look what you can do with the lambda calculus". Turing took the philosophical approach saying "this is what it means to compute". To Godel, Church's argument was incomplete. Turing provided the direct argument. Godel was convinced.

[lordnacho]

You seem like someone who might have a good book about this bit of history? Or perhaps a blog?

[jimhefferon]

About the Theory of Computation in general. A draft: https://hefferon.net/computation/index.html :-)

[cfcf14]

Wonderful explanation, thank you.

[bo1024]

I don't think it's important to quibble over who's overrated or underrated among these giants of math and CS who already get tons of recognition (I'm glad Schmidhuber brings many other historical names into the narrative).

However, yes, I do think that 'mechanization' or physical implementation is a crucial piece of Turing's contribution that is wrongly ignored in this article. And I think without mechanization, there is no CS as we understand it.

[KingOfCoders]

I can only repeat my comment from down:

"Likewise, Konrad Zuse never got a Turing award despite having created the world's first working programmable general computer 1935-41. [...] It was pointed out that none of the computers built during the 1940s were influenced in any way by Turing's 1936 theoretical paper, [...]"

[obastani]

As far as I know, Konrad Zuse didn't prove that this strategy was a universal model of computation. In contrast, Turing proved that his universal machine could emulate any other machine, given the right program.

In my view, Turing's contribution is providing a plausible definition of computation along with a deep and comprehensive theoretical characterization of the properties of this model of computation. This is why Turing machines form the basis of theoretical computer science, and not other models such as lambda calculus. I think saying that Turing machines were adopted since they were merely more convenient is highly misleading.

I think this pattern repeats a lot: There are many cases where you can point to multiple people who invented similar ideas around the same time, but it is typically the person who provided the most deep and comprehensive treatment of the subject that ultimately gets most of the credit. This depth is not conveyed in pop science attributions such as "Turing invented computation", but this doesn't mean Turing doesn't deserve the credit.

[mcguire]

I don't believe anyone has received a Turing award for creating a working computer.

[tialaramex]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wilkes

His Turing award citation: "Professor Wilkes is best known as the builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program."

[jecel]

I think Wilkes got his award for his software contributions despite being well known for his hardware efforts.

The 2009 award to Chuck Thacker, on the other hand, was clearly based on his contributions to hardware. I have the impression that ACM had a change in policy around that time.

But officially I seem to be wrong:

https://amturing.acm.org/bysubject.cfm?cat=16 https://amturing.acm.org/bysubject.cfm?cat=15

In the "hardware" category Wilkes is listed as the only one, while Thacker, with Brooks, Cocke and Wilkes are in the "computer architecture" category.

[3pt14159]

Not OP, but I agree with them.

The word computer means multiple things. In one sense it the abstraction of universal computation. Imagine a world where actual physical computers didn't progress to universal computation, but were stuck being purpose built to the present day. The field of computer science would be utterly different because they couldn't actually compute anything with their science. They could just discuss computability in an abstract sense. It'd be like physics without the particle colliders or telescopes or lasers.

I think of the founders of computer science more like the founding fathers of America, rather than a single guy named Turing, but some are more memorable than others.

[mr_toad]

> Imagine a world where actual physical computers didn't progress to universal computation, but were stuck being purpose built

It’s not clear that you need a theory of computation to build a stored process computer. You might not clearly understand the theoretical capability of such a machine , but that wouldn’t prevent you from doing many useful things with it.

[KingOfCoders]

The article writes about your point of general computation and purpose built computers:

"Likewise, Konrad Zuse never got a Turing award despite having created the world's first working programmable general computer 1935-41. [...] It was pointed out that none of the computers built during the 1940s were influenced in any way by Turing's 1936 theoretical paper, [...]"