Alan Turing

In March it announced its intention to remove historical figures from its banknotes.

Jane Austen, Winston Churchill and Alan Turing are set to be replaced with moles, badgers and hedgehogs.

According to the marketing agency commissioned to oversee the changes, the likes of Churchill are divisive, elitist, contentious and not representative of the UK's cultural and natural diversity.

They're also said to be relics of a backward-looking vision of the UK that carries too great a risk of division and controversy.

Well, they're fantastic.

I mean, you go from Beowulf, Magna Carta, Alan Turing's Computer Code, Sex Pistols, artwork, Brexit ballot paper.

So it's a real blend of all sorts, which just kept it rocking along.

There are so many things.

Well, they're fantastic.

I mean, you go from Beowulf, Magna Carta, Alan Turing's Computer Code, Sex Pistols, artwork, Brexit ballot paper.

So it's a real blend of all sorts, which just kept it rocking along.

There are so many things.

248.

Alan Turing is now deservedly on the United Kingdom's £50 banknote delighted to hear the Bank of England announce that mathematician, war hero and computer science pioneer Alan Turing will be pictured on a new £50 banknote.

249.

The end of the war the prophet who emerges with the most honour from this war is Block, 250.

I mean, people have been talking and writing about AGI or some precursor that wasn't called AGI but meant the same thing since literally antiquity, especially since the 1950s when the term artificial intelligence was born.

People were talking about, Alan Turing was writing about the thinking machine that could do anything the human brain could.

So this concept has been around for a long time, but there was no technology anywhere on the market or in research labs that could actually do what people wanted it to do.

That could take in information, learn to learn about that information and then use that to make predictions and act in the world.

That's a lot of money.

But £50 notes in the UK feature Alan Turing.

You may not have heard of him, but he is called the father of computing for the role he played in the design of the Enigma machine in World War II.

That's the one that managed to crack the codes.

So let's not worry about that one.

It's the 5, 10, 20 and 50 pound notes that most people get by on.

Anyway, the story today is that the Bank of England are doing away with Winston Churchill, Jane Austen, Alan Turing and J.M.W. Turner, as he's known.

Instead, there will be a bumblebee, a hedgehog, a barn owl and a puffin.

But I didn't talk about one thing that was most amazing of all.

Alan Turing is the mathematician, well known and now very well known after the Benedict Cumberbatch film about him, for breaking the Enigma code, the Nazi code during World War II that enabled the Allies to win the war.

He also is well known for something called Turing's patterns.

He was fascinated by repeating patterns in nature, like how come a zebra has stripes that repeat? And those are called, in science, they're called harmonics too, repeating patterns.

And we'll talk about that with Bitcoin.

But we have a great example of this with Alan Turing, right? When he cracked Enigma, he didn't send a message to the Germans.

Ha ha, we know how to read your messages.

He did not do that.