Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Alan Turing/archive1

Alan Turing

This is a very interesting article about an influential man. It has all the components of a featured article.Gilliamjf 08:09, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

• Oppose. It's good, but I think a lot of work is still needed for this to get to Featured quality. 1) It could do with a liberal sprinkling of inline citations. 2) The "Turing in fiction" looks very crufty: ("In White Wolf Game Studio's World of Darkness role-playing universe, Turing was a leading member of the mage faction known as the Virtual Adepts" etc). Perhaps split this into a subarticle Turing in fiction? 3) The "Posthumous recognition" is a collection of one- or two-sentence paragraphs. 4) The section "Pattern formation and mathematical biology" is very short; it could do with expanding. 5) We should expand on the description of ACE (computer) and its place in computing history (what is did first, what influence it had on other computers etc). 6) Generally I think the "Early computers and the Turing Test" needs to be fleshed out more. 7) A photo of Hut 8 (the section at BP where Turing was in charge) would be nice. 8) The "Cryptanalysis" section needs an overhaul (that's my fault, of course, having rewritten much of it). — Matt Crypto
• Object as per Matt Crypto. I especially find the posthumous recognition section terrible because it's a jumble of things which don't really go together well -- it strikes me more as trivia than anything else. Why not write a legacy section about how Turing's work has influenced modern computing science? Appropriate references to his inclusion in pop culture could also be included here. (As a general rule, I think any article should only include instances of where the person/thing in question was a major component of the pop culture medium in question. For example, Theodore Roosevelt makes multiple appearances in the McDuck comic books, so it's a good example of his inclusion in pop culture. What isn't a good example would be some random inclusion as a minor character. That doesn't illustrate the person's influence on pop culture -- if any -- IMO.) Johnleemk | Talk 14:35, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
• Oppose per Matt and John. The "Turing in fiction" section is crufty and should at a minimum be converted to prose (rather than a bulleted list). Preferably, that section will be moved to another article or axed completely. — BrianSmithson 15:33, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
• Oppose. The "Turing in fiction" and "Posthumous recognition" sections should be cut, and the article needs footnotes. Also, the organization of the article doesn't make much sense to me. Looking at the section headings, I can't puzzle out why they're in the order they're in, whether a given piece of information would definitely belong in one particular sentence. A lot of good work has been done here, but this is an important topic, and deserves a better treatment.--Bcrowell 07:12, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
• Object per all. —Eternal Equinox | talk 01:26, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
• Object The claim that Turing developed the Bombe method for solving Enigma ciphers is false. The method was developed by a Polish cryptographer named Rejewski in ~1937. Source: Solving the Enigma: History of the Cryptanalytic Bombe, National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland
  • Not quite, and your NSA source doesn't say that. While superficially similar, the Turing (and Turing-Welchman) bombes operated on an entirely different principle to the Polish bomby. At best, we can suppose that Turing's version was inspired by the Polish version, but it can't really be seen as a refinement or upgrade or any such: the machines are just too different. I'd recommend: Donald Davies, "The Bombe – a Remarkable Logic Machine," Cryptologia, 23(2), April 1999, pp. 108–138 — a journal article that directly compares the two machines on a technical level. — Matt Crypto 17:53, 3 May 2006 (UTC)