Closer to a Molecular Computer?

 And thus very, very small?

The Sci-Fi Dream of a ‘Molecular Computer’ Is Getting More Real

By Wired, November 3, 2022

David Leigh dreams of building a small machine. Really small. Something minuscule. Or more like … molecule. "Chemists like me have been working on trying to turn molecules into machines for about 25 years now," says Leigh, an organic chemist from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. "And of course, it's all baby steps. You're building on all those that went before you."

In 1936, English mathematician Alan Turing imagined an autonomous machine capable of carrying out any precisely coded algorithm. The hypothetical machine would read a strip of tape dotted with symbols that, when interpreted sequentially, would instruct the machine to act. It might transcribe, translate, or compute—turning code into a message, or a math problem into an answer. The Turing machine was a prophetic vision of modern computers. While your laptop doesn't rely on tape to run programs, the philosophy behind it is the same. "That laid the foundation for modern computing," says Leigh.

Leigh now believes that tiny molecular versions of the Turing machine could assemble what we struggle to build in the organic realm, like new drugs and plastics with traits so enhanced and precise that they're out of reach for current tools. And he's confident that he can do it. "It's absolutely clear that it's possible," he says, "because there already is this working example called biology." Nature has given every life-form its version of the Turing machine: ribosomes, cellular structures that slide down sequences of mRNA to churn out proteins one amino acid at a time. No life on earth can function without them.

From Wired

View Full Article   

Cybersecurity

A piece that looks at the history and math background of modern cyber security.    Not overly technical video.

Cybersecurity, Nuclear Security, Alan Turing, and Illogical Logic
Martin E. Hellman discusses "Cybersecurity, Nuclear Security, Alan Turing, and Illogical Logic" (cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/12/223042), a Contributed Article in the December 2017 CACM.

Turing Award at 50

Twitter Stream from ACM's 'Turing Award at 50' meeting this week.  Watched small part of it, inspirational and am glad to see it will be made available on going, details at the link.

ACM Marks 50 Years of the ACM A.M. Turing Award and Computing's Greatest Achievements

Since its inauguration in 1966, the ACM A. M. Turing Award has recognized major contributions of lasting importance in computing. Through the years, it has become the most prestigious technical award in the field, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of computing.”

During the next several months, ACM will celebrate 50 years of the Turing Award and the visionaries who have received it. Our aim is to highlight the significant impact of the contributions of the Turing Laureates on computing and society, to look ahead to the future of technology and innovation, and to help inspire the next generation of computer scientists to invent and dream.

ACM’s Celebration of 50 Years of the ACM Turing Award will be livestreamed during the event on June 23 – 24, and available for viewing on demand afterwards. ... "  

How an AI Won at Poker

In Engadget:  How the AI won in a game with very high uncertainty.  Intriguing with lots of detail. How might this be carried over to the business operations world? How is risk linked to that uncertainty?    How is it similar and different?  Out of Carnegie Mellon.

( I am reminded that Alan Turing wrote a simple minimax strategy rule driven poker player around 1947, written about in  Alan Turing: The Enigma)

Reviewing Turings Enigma

Reviewed the book:  Alan Turing: The Enigma  by Alan Hodges. Hodges also has a site that provides resource materials and updates to the book at   http://www.turing.org.uk.     See the movie, The Imitation Game, now available on Netfllix, generally based on the book.

Bletchley Park to Become Cyber College

Been following the restoration of British code breaking and early computing site Bletchley Park for years.   Now it is slated to become a Cyber Education College.  In Mashable.  Good idea.

Will this Computer Stop?

Fascinating experiment underway at MIT that addresses the deep math behind every computer. I remember programming my first simulated Turing machine.  Set off a a deep 'aha' that has left me engaged.

By Jacob Aron in New Scientist:

One hundred and fifty years of mathematics will be proved wrong if a new computer program stops running. Thankfully, it’s unlikely to happen, but the code behind it is testing the limits of the mathematical realm.

The program is a simulated Turing machine, a mathematical model of computation created by codebreaker Alan Turing. In 1936, he showed that the actions of any computer algorithm can be mimicked by a simple machine that reads and writes 0s and 1s on an infinitely long tape by working through a set of states, or instructions. The more complex the algorithm, the more states the machine requires.

Now Scott Aaronson and Adam Yedidia of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created three Turing machines with behaviour that is entwined in deep questions of mathematics. This includes the proof of the 150-year-old Riemann hypothesis – thought to govern the patterns of prime numbers. ... " 

Truth in Film Visualized

In InformationisBeautiful: An interesting view of film truth versus fiction, visualized in a time line.   I took a look at the Turing biopic example 'The Imitation Game'.  Relatively recent history.   I have always been intrigued to understand the extent to which film based on truth is actually true.   Of course, this depends on the contextual meaning of truth.  No video cameras were present, later recollections can always be suspect. Agendas drive portrayal.  And I am sure debatable depending on observer,   A problem with all kinds of history. Would like to see this kind of data in near real time. Worth a look.   Another film done is 'The Social Network',  covering a much later period, but also computing history.

Have used the real-time timeline for other kinds of data like sales delivery versus marketing spend. The simplicity can be instructive.

How Would Alan Turing Fix AI?

In CWorld: by John Ball:  of Thinking Solutions. Some interesting points about AI:   " ...  Computers were designed to compress and duplicate information. They don’t handle A.I. well because they leave too much work to programmers. Programmers were replaced by engineers using statistics in waves of hope from the 1970s, but the results remain inaccurate and limited. A.I. hasn't scaled and after nearly 60 years of effort, and a new approach is warranted. ... " 

What Question Might Turing Pose Now?

Palindrome Games at Bletchley Park

Brought to my attention in the Language Log,  Which points to a much longer piece on  Palindrome construction games played by the code breakers at Bletchley Park,  as shown in the recent movie about Alan Turing and the Enigma Machine: The Imitation Game.   Still in theaters.  For you text analytics, game playing code breakers out there, this is meaty stuff.  For others, bear with us.   At very least it shows the complex structure and richness of human language.

Longest clever English palindrome (It reads the same in both directions, ignoring spaces and punctuation):

Doc, note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod

Cognitive Computing on Film

Another look at the recent Turing film.  Some interesting points.  Did he invent the computer?  Well not the general purpose ones we expect today.

" .....  The movie’s designers embellished the machine a bit by using bright red electrical wiring to illustrate the effect of a living being with blood-carrying arteries. The machine had to flex to the movie’s narrative and had to be viewable as a work in progress as the story unfolded. The modern-day engineers settled on Adobe Illustrator with a computer-aided design (CAD) plug-in for the design software used to create their Turing machine. This package allowed for texture, light, and visual qualities that they judged to be better than other CAD programs. .... " 

The Banburismus Process and Joan Clarke

After seeing and reviewing the movie about Alan Turing movie: The Imitation Game,  I took my research obsession to looking further at Joan Elisabeth Clarke,  Turings sometime fiance, and colleague at Bletchley Park during WWII.  She was also an award winning Cambridge mathematician. Portrayed in the movie by actress Keira Knightley.

In her WP article it was mentioned that she was a cryptanalyst and a practitioner of what was called Banburismus,  a method used to simplify code breaking. Expanded by Turing and possibly improved by Clarke and other members of the team. Some of this work is still considered confidential.

There is a lengthy article about the Banburismus  process in the WP.    A fascinating look at how a polyalphabetic substitution cypher based on the wheels of the Enigma machine could be simplified with a hand and visualizing algorithm. The article even gives several examples.  Leads to an appreciation of how difficult this method was without programmable computing.  Also an early look at text analytics.

Further, it is mentioned that this was a development of the 'clock method', developed by Polish cryptanalyst Jerzy Rozycki.    Pointing to the key work done, barely mentioned in the movie, by the Polish group.

Review of Imitation Game: Alan Turing Movie and Asset Values

Saw the recently released Alan Turing Biopic yesterday.

There were a few big errors in fact and emphasis. Like barely mentioning the key Polish results in solving the Enigma.  Inferring Turing and his small team figured it all out themselves.  Including the fact that a fundamental user error by the Germans allowed the code to be broken.   In fact Turing then mostly made it more efficient to break the code by mechanizing the search for the machine settings.

Movie showed conditions the security obsessed British would not have allowed.  Like casually discussing their work in a public bar.  Even a hint that they were working on it would have devastated the effort.   Recall that most of the information about this era was not revealed until 50 years later, in the 90s. I read about some of it then.  The agreements in the 1940s NDAs involved were largely kept.

Turing's 'girlfriend' played by Keira Knightly, was too model-like.   A sexism lesson was required, and made, though many women had been used at Bletchley before. Admittedly not in 'management'.  Some obvious, melodramatic and 'just so' solutions were depicted.

His 'computer' was very special purpose, but implied to be much more.  His Turing 'Machine' was a fundamental thought experiment, but that was not adequately differentiated or explained.

There was an excellent depiction of why once you broke the code you had to statistically dole out its use, to have it be of any value at all.  Effectively choosing who would die in a very hot war.   Few people understand this.  But this has a real data asset management and valuation message,  even today. See link on this topic below.

The deep irony of AI and imitation game concepts mirroring his own sexuality were also well done. Ben Cumberbatch was superb in presenting a quirky geek.  

But I am splitting hairs, you can't explain a complex life in an hour and forty minutes. Overall one of the best tech bio pics  I have seen, despite the flaws. Was surprised to see it in a crowded theater. Thought it would not be many peoples cup of tea.  See it if you can.

More on Alan Turing in this blog.

#ImitationGame

Alan Turing Year and now the Movie

" ... June 23, 2012, was the Centenary of Alan Turing’s birth in London. During his relatively brief life, Turing made a unique impact on the history of computing, computer science, artificial intelligence, developmental biology, and the mathematical theory of computability..... "  This is from a site that continues the observation.  And a Twitter presence.  In addition there is a new movie on the topic: The Imitation Game, to be released this November 28 in the US.  The movie is on my list.

Google's Neural Turing Machine

This still does not mean we can replace our conventional machines with such neural networks, but it can have profound implication for analytics.

Google's Secretive DeepMind Startup Unveils a "Neural Turing Machine"
DeepMind has built a neural network that can access an external memory like a conventional Turing machine. The result is a computer that mimics the short-term memory of the human brain. ....  "

IBM Streaming Analytics

We did considerable work in using real time data to predict maintenance operations in high speed manufacturing.  Some of the methods we developed were ultimately licensed out.

Recent press release:

" ... Among the seven vendors evaluated, "IBM scored highest on performance and scalability." The report notes that "IBM InfoSphere Stream is industrial strength" and "has comprehensive stream processing operators and development tools that can satisfy the gnarliest of use-cases." It also credits IBM's "significant investments in research."

IBM’s status as a leader in the big data streaming analytics market is based on the evaluation of its InfoSphere Streams software. Developed by IBM Research, InfoSphere Streams rapidly ingests and continuously analyzes massive volumes and varieties of streaming data from thousands of sources to help improve business insight and decision making and enable predictive and cognitive analytics. The technology can process millions of messages per second.

IBM’s Big Data and Analytics capabilities are helping to drive transformation in areas such as energy, financial services, healthcare and telecommunications, while C-suite executives including CMOs, CFOs and CHROs across industries are now using IBM analytics to deliver better business results. ... "

Optimization Direct for Operations Research

In the early days of my career, most of my work was done with optimization analytics,  primarily in R&D, Supply Chain and Manufacturing.  We utilized methods that had been developed during the second world War to improve complex transport systems.  Called then, and still now:  Operations Research.   These are predictive analytics methods, but did not typically have the richness of data we have today.

A couple of encounters in the past few weeks have led me to think about how the OR techniques are being used used effectively today.  A number of companies are still successful in this area, for example Optimization Direct, just met one of their execs.

HP Embraces 3D Printing, Immersion

In CWorld:  Will this change manufacturing?  The move is good to watch.  It is blended reality, they say. New term to me, I  prefer 'remote manufacturing' as more descriptive

" .... HP today announced a new 3D printing technology called Multi Jet Fusion that it said will enable mass production of parts with a technology traditionally reserved for rapid prototyping.

The new industrial 3D printer,  about the size of a washing machine, is 10 times faster and 50% less expensive than current systems on the market, HP said. The printer can also use a myriad of colors and materials. .... " 

A further good idea, they announce the supporting  " ... Sprout  ... a new immersive computing platform that combines a 23-in touch screen monitor and horizontal capacitive touch mat with a scanner, depth sensor, hi-res camera, and projector in a single desktop device. .... "

Fast Track Back to Kanban

It has been a considerable time since I have worked with Kanban, the lean,  just in time manufacturing process.   This InfoQ piece outlines what it is and a workshop that addresses how to achieve it.  Even including a Kanban game to teach the concepts.

" ... So you are considering getting started with Kanban, but where do you start? In this article we describe the approach we used in Danske Bank to get teams off to a good start with Kanban. You are free to use the material and content to get started yourself and the purpose of the article is to explain the what and how of the workshop to enable you to use it. .... " 

This also makes me think of electronic or e-Kanban, which has been integrated into corporate systems such as ERP.   I often thought of Kanban as 'activated' business process models.   Now with more data and better analytics, might we take e-Kanban further, analyzing the streams of data now created in the enterprise to create new kinds of Kanban intervention?   What might that look like?  Thoughts?