Popular Science - (July 2011)

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Lutero Chaloux

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Jun 28, 2024, 7:41:08 PM6/28/24
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I had the pleasure of giving a series of lectures on algorithms for information search on the internet to the association of Danish librarians. This is a highly educated crowd with a lot of background knowledge, so we could fast-forward through some of the basic stuff.

The bulk of the presentation was based on somewhat tailored versions of my current Algorithms, explained talk, and an introduction to various notions of group fairness in algorithmic fairness, which can be found elsewhere in slightly different form.

The claim I want to establish is that universal computation is to information technology what evolution is to biology: the single fundamental conceptual breakthrough that makes everything clear, and without which many phenomena become impossible to reason about.

If it should turn out that the basic logics of a machine designed for the numerical solution of differential equations coincide with the logics of a machine intended to make bills for a department store, I would regard this as the most amazing coincidence that I have ever encountered.

This angle fit my lecture perfectly, of course: The Imitation Game is a film about encryption and the struggle against totalitarianism and the fact that your own government may not have your own best interests at heart, so I was able to replace the slanderous Aiken quote with a current events angle that made Turing even more relevant!

Jag pratar om cyberkrig: vad det r, vad det inte r, och hur det fungerar. Frelsningen innehller lite teknologihistoria, olika scenarier fr cyberattacker, lite om internets struktur och protokoller, och en minikurs i cybersabotage: hur man hittar lsenord, genomfr ett frdelad verbelastningsangrepp samt kodinjicering.

I gave a popular science talk this morning about which computational world we live in. The main conceit was to couple the question about the existence of efficient algorithms for NP-hard problems to utopias in science fiction and the technological singularity. I think this worked out pretty well.

My presentation is based on a talk I gave in the Fall 2010 Teknik- och Naturvetarcirkeln for Folkuniversitetet, but for the art museum I tone down the technical aspects and instead build the talk around a presentation of verious artworks featuring Turing, including:

Discover new research from across the sciences in our international, high impact journals. Find out more about our values as a not-for-profit society publisher, our support for open science and our commitment to improving inclusion and diversity within science publishing.

Since 1988, the Royal Society has celebrated outstanding popular science writing and authors. Over the decades, the Prize has celebrated some notable winners including Bill Bryson, Stephen Hawking, Camilla Pang, and most recently Ed Yong in 2023.

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