Hacker News Reader

Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

You make it sound like he was murdered because he was gay. I don't think it was quite that clear cut.

I'm quite a believer in "if he hadn't done it, someone else would have" personally. I don't mean to belittle anyones contribution, but the idea that there's only one genius who can come up with something seems very unlikely to me.

Most inventions are 'discovered' by many people at around the same time.

View on HN

Other people did do it, and even at nearly the exact same time. Turing just did it more convincingly. (See: Alonzo Church and the Lambda calculus).

And Turing helped a lot with the War effort, building hardware (i.e. stuff you can kick) as well as developing theories.

+1. Yeah, I was only thinking of his work on computation (not even AI!). I should have been more clear.

> You make it sound like he was murdered because he was gay. I don't think it was quite that clear cut.

Lets turn it around then. If he hadn't been gay, would he have been murdered?

> Most inventions are 'discovered' by many people at around the same time.

Yeah, this is true. Even revolutionary ideas seem to show up at multiple places at the same time. So it seems that the state of knowledge at the time of invention matters a great deal.

>If he hadn't been gay, would he have been murdered?

He committed suicide.

Anyone who has ever discovered anything surely knows this? The world is full of curious minds. This doesn't belittle this individual curious mind but honour the millions of others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com