> Turing is so revered that the most coveted prize in computer science, the A. M. Turing Award, was named after him. It is worth noting that Turing’s sexual inclinations and religious convictions did little to diminish his notoriety. Homosexual and atheist movements around the world have wasted not time in transforming the man into a martyr and the sad history of his life into a veritable cause célèbre. The end result is that nothing negative may be said about Turing.

Dragging Alan Turings reputation in to a technical argument is really bad form.

I guess I'm proving the authors assertion to some extent, but I'm quite sure that nobody ever got scolded for a solid critique of Turings work because he was a homosexual. That's a pretty weird thing to say.

> I am free to bash Turing and his supporters to my heart’s content.

Yes, you are, but it makes no sense to bash the person, an argument should state what you have to say about the mans work.

> In fairness to Turing, my criticism is directed mostly toward those who have turned the man into the infallible god that he never was and never claimed to be.

Right... so that's two full paragraphs now of personal attacks.

> The Turing machine cannot be said to be universal because it is a strictly sequential machine by definition whereas the universe is inherently parallel.

Someone mis-understands the meaning of the word 'universal' in the 'universal Turing machine'.

Don't miss the introduction to the second part:

> If what I write about Alan Turing offends you, then don’t read my stuff. It’s not meant for you. And don’t send me emails to tell me that you don't like it because I don’t care. If I am a kook in your opinion, you are an idiot in mine.

Says that guy writing this on a device that probably wouldn't even have existed if it hadn't been for the person he maligns.

> I have touched on this before in my seminal work on software reliability but I would like to elaborate on it a little to make my point. The computing model that I am proposing is based on an idealized machine that I call the Universal Behaving Machine or UBM for short. It assumes that a computer is a behaving machine that senses and reacts to changes in its environment.

And I'm not allowed to call this guy a kook...

> I think that all the major problems of the computer industry can be attributed to the elitism and intransigence that is rampant in the scientific community. The peer review system is partly to blame. It is a control mechanism that keeps outsiders at bay.

I've heard that exact sentence before I think, it was in the context of some guy claiming that he could extract zero point energy from spinning magnets, he had it working but was too busy to demonstrate it, in spite of being offered a healthy sum of money.

> With the parallel programming crisis in full swing, the computer industry desperately needs a Kuhnian revolution. There is no stopping it. Many reactionaries will fight it teeth and nails but they will fall by the wayside. We are witnessing the beginning of the end of the Turing madness. I say, good riddance.

Indeed.

What a load of tripe.

The Von-Neumann bottleneck is indeed a problem, and there are quite a few people (Sutherland, and, surprisingly, a number of HN'ers) busy in trying to find a way to deal with this.

Whether or not anything like that will ever supercede the Turing 'engine' of computing remains to be seen, for now it seems we will end up with some kind of computing fabric, where each cell is a minimal computational element, and where the cells together will perform computations comparable to the ones we run today on our von-Neumann bottle-necked computers.

But we will still speak of those machines as Turing complete, simply because that is the yardstick by which we measure computation, the ability of a computational device to simulate every other computational device, no matter how inefficient.

Whatever will happen, I'm fairly sure that this guy that tries to make sullying someones name into a platform for his own tripe will not be a part of it.