I'm curious, was the crime Turing was convicted of actually called "homosexuality," or was it called "gross indecency and sexual perversion"? --
Janet Davis
The crime was "gross indecency and sexual perversion."
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The Cunctator
The MacTutor
? biography linked in the article mentions blackmail as reason for his going to the police. Is there a reference to a more precise biography on the web? --
AxelBoldt
For precision and accuracy, go to www.turing.org.uk, Andrew Hodges' site. Unfortunately, he doesn't really discuss the trial in detail on the site, leaving the complicated story for his definitive book, Alan Turing: the Enigma. Suffice it to say there was an element of threatened blackmail, but it wasn't really about revealing that Turing was gay, and didn't really figure into the course of events. Basically, once the police got involved in Alan Turing's affairs (so to speak) for reasons that had little to nothing to do with homosexuality, they quickly discovered his homosexuality (he told them) and arrested him for it. The MacTutor
? biography has a lot of misleadingness. We should email Andrew Hodges (andrew@synth.co.uk) to see if he's willing to contribute his encyclopedic entry (
[1]) to here or Nupedia.
--
The Cunctator
I hate to admit this, but I had to look up 'larceny' in the dictionary. Is that really a conventional word? --
JanHidders
"he proved that there was no solution to the Entscheidungsproblem, also known in computer science as the halting problem."
That's not true. While any instance of the halting problem can be transformed into the Entscheidungsproblem, that makes
the halting problem a "subset", if you like, of the Entscheidungsproblem rather than its equivalent (Robert Merkel <rgmerk at mira dot net>)
Well, the "also known in cs as the halting problem" is oversimplified, I agree. However, it is true that Turing showed that the Entscheidungsproblem is unsolvable by reducing it to the Halting problem, so in a sense the two problems are equivalent. --AxelBoldt
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