No Arabic abstract
The ACM A.M. Turing Award is commonly acknowledged as the highest distinction in the realm of computer science. Since 1960s, it has been awarded to computer scientists who made outstanding contributions. The significance of this award is far-reaching to the laureates as well as their research teams. However, unlike the Nobel Prize that has been extensively investigated, little research has been done to explore this most important award. To this end, we propose the Turing Number (TN) index to measure how far a specific scholar is to this award. Inspired by previous works on Erdos Number and Bacon Number, this index is defined as the shortest path between a given scholar to any Turing Award Laureate. Experimental results suggest that TN can reflect the closeness of collaboration between scholars and Turing Award Laureates. With the correlation analysis between TN and metrics from the bibliometric-level and network-level, we demonstrate that TN has the potential of reflecting a scholars academic influence and reputation.
Computer science has grown rapidly since its inception in the 1950s and the pioneers in the field are celebrated annually by the A.M. Turing Award. In this paper, we attempt to shed light on the path to influential computer scientists by examining the characteristics of the 72 Turing Award laureates. To achieve this goal, we build a comprehensive dataset of the Turing Award laureates and analyze their characteristics, including their personal information, family background, academic background, and industry experience. The FP-Growth algorithm is used for frequent feature mining. Logistic regression plot, pie chart, word cloud and map are generated accordingly for each of the interesting features to uncover insights regarding personal factors that drive influential work in the field of computer science. In particular, we show that the Turing Award laureates are most commonly white, male, married, United States citizen, and received a PhD degree. Our results also show that the age at which the laureate won the award increases over the years; most of the Turing Award laureates did not major in computer science; birth order is strongly related to the winners success; and the number of citations is not as important as one would expect.
A Turmit is a Turing machine that works over a two-dimensional grid, that is, an agent that moves, reads and writes symbols over the cells of the grid. Its state is an arrow and, depending on the symbol that it reads, it turns to the left or to the right, switching the symbol at the same time. Several symbols are admitted, and the rule is specified by the turning sense that the machine has over each symbol. Turmites are a generalization of Langtons ant, and they present very complex and diverse behaviors. We prove that any Turmite, except for those whose rule does not depend on the symbol, can simulate any Turing Machine. We also prove the P-completeness of prediction their future behavior by explicitly giving a log-space reduction from the Topological Circuit Value Problem. A similar result was already established for Langtons ant; here we use a similar technique but prove a stronger notion of simulation, and for a more general family.
This is a typeset version of Alan Turings Second World War research paper textit{The Applications of Probability to Cryptography}. A companion paper textit{Paper on Statistics of Repetitions} is also available in typeset form from arXiv at arXiv:1505.04715. The original papers give a text along with figures and tables. They provide a fascinating insight into the preparation of the manuscripts, as well as the style of writing at a time when typographical errors were corrected by hand, and mathematical expression handwritten into spaces left in the text. Working with the papers in their original format provides some challenges, so they have been typeset for easier reading and access.
Do algorithms for drawing graphs pass the Turing Test? That is, are their outputs indistinguishable from graphs drawn by humans? We address this question through a human-centred experiment, focusing on `small graphs, of a size for which it would be reasonable for someone to choose to draw the graph manually. Overall, we find that hand-drawn layouts can be distinguished from those generated by graph drawing algorithms, although this is not always the case for graphs drawn by force-directed or multi-dimensional scaling algorithms, making these good candidates for Turing Test success. We show that, in general, hand-drawn graphs are judged to be of higher quality than automatically generated ones, although this result varies with graph size and algorithm.
This is a typeset version of Alan Turings declassified Second World War paper textit{Paper on Statistics of Repetitions}. See the companion paper, textit{The Applications of Probability to Cryptography}, also available from arXiv at arXiv:1505.04714, for Editors Notes.