Buying the special issue of La Recherche on “La révolution des mathématiques”, I discovered that this is the Alan Turing Year in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Turing‘s birth. The math department at the University of Leeds has a webpage on all the events connected with this celebration. From all over the World. (There is even a Turing relay in Cambridge, unfortunately it is not open to the general public… Unless you are attending the Isaac Newton Institute at the time.) Quite fitting a tribute. (Given Turing’s contributions to Bayesian analysis, as depicted e.g. in the theory that would not die, ISBA could have included a special session in the ISBA 2012 meeting in Kyoto. I will certainly dedicate the session I co-organise there on parallel computing to his memory.)
Archive for Alan Turing
2012, Turing year
Posted in R, Statistics, University life with tags Alan Turing, Isaac Newton Institute, ISBA, Kyoto, La Recherche, parallelisation, University of Leeds on January 3, 2012 by xi'anRandomness through computation
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags A Search for Certainty, Alan Sokal, Alan Turing, Andrei Kolmogorov, Apple II, Benford's Law, computation, Hector Zenil, Kurt Gödel, Martin-Löf, Ockham's razor, pseudo-random generator, randomness, statistical tests, Wolfram Research on June 22, 2011 by xi'an
A few months ago, I received a puzzling advertising for this book, Randomness through Computation, and I eventually ordered it, despite getting a rather negative impression from reading the chapter written by Tomasso Toffoli… The book as a whole is definitely perplexing (even when correcting for this initial bias) and I would not recommend it to readers interested in simulation, in computational statistics or even in the philosophy of randomness. My overall feeling is indeed that, while there are genuinely informative and innovative chapters in this book, some chapters read more like newspeak than scientific material (mixing the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, quantum physics, and NP completeness within the same sentence) and do not provide a useful entry on the issue of randomness. Hence, the book is not contributing in a significant manner to my understanding of the notion. (This post also appeared on the Statistics Forum.) Continue reading
JSM 2010 [day 2]
Posted in Books, pictures, R, Running, Statistics, University life with tags 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alan Turing, Bletchley Park, I.J. Good, JSM 2010, Stanley Park mermaid, statprob, Vancouver on August 3, 2010 by xi'an
After a very good early run in Stanley Park, I went to a morning session on new statistical challenges in genetics, but unfortunately could not keep focussed enough (due to a very short night, still being not tuned to Pacific time!) so I ended up chatting with Sid Chib at the Springer booth about the future of R and the drawback of it running too slowly… The second session of the morning I attended was the I.J. Good memorial session (although there were many alternative choices I could have made at the same time!) where Steve Fienberg, Jim Berger, Adrian Raftery and David Banks gave different perspectives on the life and influence of this leading figure. After his work in Bletchley Park along Alan Turing during the war, already using Bayes factors introduced a few years earlier by Harold Jeffreys, I.J. Good contributed very much to the Bayesian revival of the 50’s. (A fact not mentioned this morning is that he was a consultant for 2001: A Space Odyssey!) The afternoon session on Bayesian processing of massive data systems was somehow compulsory since I was talking in this session! While the talks were interestingly diverse, there were however again very people in the room, making me feel the attendance was much lower than last year. As the day ended earlier to let free space to the presidential address, this eventually came as a less exciting day (but left me time for an early evening swim plus two mixers!)…
