Turing And The Increasingly Important Case For Theory

Editors note:Zavain Dar is an early-stage VC at Lux Capital and Lecturer at Stanford University. He invests and supports deep technology companies leveraging advancements in Artificial Intelligence, Infrastructure, and emerging data and has taught courses on cryptocurrency and the intersections of AI, philosophy and venture.

Like many in Silicon Valley, I recently saw Morten Tyldums The Imitation Game. I have a soft spot for underdog academic narratives and actually teared up. However, I couldnt shake the feeling the film pigeonholed the breadth and depth of Turings work to early cryptography and its mechanized instantiation duringWWII.

Cryptography aside, Turings work, theory and models still underline undergraduate curriculums in computer science, mathematics and philosophy. His models for computation form the basis for how mathematicians and computer scientists structure both what is solvable and the efficiency with which we can algorithmically solve answerable questions. His Church-Turing Thesis coupled with Godels Incompleteness Theorems still has philosophers debating the existence of universal constraints around human knowledge.

Finally, and perhaps most pressing given the ongoing renaissance in machine learning, the Turing Test remains the de facto yardstick against which we measure progress and traction in artificial intelligence.

Whereas The Imitation Game focuseson cryptography and wartime technology, there is no doubt that Turings work also includesAI, theoretical computer science, mathematics and even epistemology.

The realization that Turings work still has high relevance in both academia and industry got me thinking about how and why this is the case. What lessons can todays technology entrepreneurs and investors pull from Turings intellectual longevity?

I start with a few very basic and generalized broad-stroke assumptions. (The focus on high level Big-O approximations only seems fitting for this piece).

How does Turings work relate to this pseudo-anthropologic and economic postulating? Well, etched in Turings work was his ability to cut through the engineering limitations of his time and grapple with the underlying theory. By decoupling the current state of the art from the theoretical ground truth, Turing produced work that hasnt lost applicability and has shown a near infinite shelf life.

His work today carries just as much, if not more (given the just-now relevant engineering possibilities), applicability as it did duringhis own time. This isnt wholly dissimilar from how theoretical physicists working on chalk boards view their work in juxtaposition to applied physicists in cutting-edge linear accelerators.

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Turing And The Increasingly Important Case For Theory