How Computer Databases Work: Overcoming the Black Box Mentality

by Alan M. Turing

I am a ghost writer. As far as the world is concerned, I died on June 7, 1954. I died young, too young. So now I have been given a second chance to live. To you I am a ghost; as far as I am concerned, I am fully alive. Despite my untimely demise, I have kept up with the computer revolution I started. How Computer Databases Overcoming the Black Box Mentality is my attempt to make a complex subject understandable to the lay person. This is my first use of a slide show, but I felt I needed a simple format to make clear some complex ideas. I like to explain things in Plain English with clear illustrations. I have been told of the urgency of my task. Key management personnel today accept on blind faith what they are being told about their computers. The technologies of engineering and science are operating full force. But there is a real issue as to whether their complex tools are fully understood by anyone outside the small group of engineers who develop these tools. I am trying very hard to explain how databases, data warehouses, and data mining operations work in simple, yet accurate terms anyone can understand. My hope is that studying How Computer Databases Overcoming the Black Box Mentality will enable every manager of computer-related projects to evaluate fully and properly the reports verbal and written submitted by subordinates. I want to penetrate the mystery of what goes on inside the black box of computer especially databases that are so crucial to business, the professions, and national security. I want to correct ubiquitous misunderstandings of basic database concepts such as metadata. I want to create a learning attitude for managers that can be carried directly into your working responsibilities. Open Access Policy You are free to share, copy, or redistribute the materials in this text in any medium or format. You are free to adapt, reuse, modify, transform, or build upon the materials in this text for any purpose whatsoever.

156 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 16, 2016

About the author

Works of British mathematician Alan Mathison Turing explored the possibility of computers and raised fundamental questions about artificial intelligence; during World War II, he helped to decipher the German enigma codes and thus contributed to the Allied victory.

This highly influential English logician, cryptanalyst, and scientist developed and provided a formalization of the concept of "algorithm" with the eponymous machine, which played a significant role in the modern creation. People widely considered this father.

Turing worked for the government code and cypher school at Bletchley park, code-breaking center of Britain. For a time, he headed hut 8, the responsible naval section. He devised a number of techniques, including the method of the "bombe," an electromechanical machine that ably found settings, for breaking ciphers. After the war, he worked at the national physical laboratory and created the ACE of the first designs for a stored program.

Biology interested Turing towards the end of his life.
He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis and predicted oscillating reactions, such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky, first observed in the 1960s.

Still illegal homosexual acts of Turing resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952 in the United Kingdom. He accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. From cyanide poisoning, he died several weeks before his forty-second birthday. An inquest determined suicide; his mother and some other persons thought of his accidental death.

Following an Internet campaign, Gordon Brown, prime minister of Britain, on 10 September 2009 made an official public apology on behalf of the government for the postwar treatment of Turing.