As they say, opinions are a dime a dozen. The author would say that, if the Turing Machine was relevant to parallel programming, we would not have a parallel programming crisis and you would not be reading this and getting all twisted out of shape because your idol is not what he's made out to be.
Since your posting history is intricately entwined with rebel science would it be fair to ask you if you are somehow affiliated ?
So, then I could answer you like this:
I don't have any idols, and Alan Turing wouldn't be one of them but I recognize the man for what he's done and I think that personal attacks have no place in a scientific argument.
By twisting this into an argument about people the 'author' (you ?) displays a shocking lack of tact and detracts from his argument, assuming he has any to make.
The 'parallel programming crisis', as you name it is a reality, there are plenty of people working hard on getting a handle on it, and somehow all of those that are actually productive manage to do that without resorting to personal attacks. Slinging mud at a famous person is one way to become notorious, but it is not a way to achieve anything.
"Mathematicians notwithstanding, a computer is a class of automaton known as a behaving machine. As such, it must not be seen as a function calculator that takes input arguments and returns an answer. It should be seen as belonging to the category of machines like brains and neural networks" from http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2010/02/computer-scientists...
I am sure there is meaning in this, but I am not sure it is a meaning that yields readily to rational thought. Hence my classification of the blog as noise.
Do I need to spell out the similarities with Time Cube, or enumerate John Baez's Crackpot Index in an oddly self-referential strange loop?
It is indeed not rocket science. Or much of any science.
edit: "We are all accustomed to believe that everything is made of something. We are taught that matter consists of molecules and that molecules are made of atoms which are themselves made of even smaller components. This line of reasoning makes sense initially but, as seen below, it cannot be sustained." if you think I am merely being obtuse.
You are worse than obtuse. You are plain dishonest. You are picking stuff up out of context in order to appear to make a valid disparaging point but you are just being an a*hole. And you know it.
Personal reprimands from you are effective in snapping otherwise reasonable people out of the mindset that sometimes results from anonymity, but it's just a stop-gap measure. I know you already know this, but it's worth pointing out.
Tangential anecdote: the last 10 or so uncivil comments I've read have been from throwaway accounts and accounts with small post counts/karma. I suspect most of these accounts are proxies for more active ones. Not sure if this metric can be leveraged in some way without producing too many false positives. Using machine learning to enforce civility is kind of ironic actually. Still, might be worth investigating.
Well, Savain would say, "If the Turing Computing Model is as awesome as computer scientists make it out to be, why doesn't it solve the parallel programming crisis?"
Still doesn't really help. What's the while loop actually doing? Where's the data being stored, and how do you get it out?
Similarly for his quicksort example (http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/quicksort.htm) - from what I can see, there's no means to input or output whatever you're sorting - that part is all internal, and the only accessible parts are 'start' and 'done'.
I think you need to drag your understanding and drop it onto his concepts. You're far too bogged down with all of this "seeing". When are you people going to stop just seeing, and start truly knowing? Drag and drop your mind. It's the way of the future.
