Alan Turing

[Pabitra]

Alan Turing, finally

[Figleaf]

A worthy design. Letter groups and part of the decoding machinery that was indeed only a foretaste of what was to come. Nice.

Peter

[eurocoin]

The design contains the hidden messages "Gears Grin Than", "Only a foretaste of what is to come" and the designers initials "CD and MD".

The "Gears Grin Than" refers to a geocode system that was developed by the company What3words Ltd. Every block of 3 square metres on earth was given a combination of 3 words. The words can be entered on what3words.com to see the location. In this case, the code ///Gears.Grin.Than is for a location at the University of Cambridge, where Turin studied mathematics. I am not fond of the idea to use such a commercial and hardly relevant thing on the coin, and also wonder whether the Michael Dent that is listed as one of the founders of the company, is family of the artist.

"Only a foretaste of what is to come" is a quote of Alan Turing of 1949.

"CD and MD" are the designers initials for Christian Davies and Matthew Dent.

[chrisild]

The design is basically a good one in my view. That also includes the "hidden" Turing quote. As for the What3words reference, I find that quite strange too. This is a proprietary service, and not terribly useful either. It does not work across languages, so the service has to create a new "system" for every language it wants W3W to be used in. (And three words may be easier to learn, but plain coordinates such as "48.86747, 2.32944" are not privately owned and can easily be sent via various media ...)

[Figleaf]

The location system is a mind-boggling theory, but it would not have been practically possible in Turing's time, i.e. without fast computers and mapping satellites.

It was fun to look up my home and find out that the place where I have lunch and the place where I work are identified differently. I did realise that the place where I sleep could not be identified, because it is not on the ground floor. It makes no difference for a guided missile, of course, but it would confound medical staff, trying to evacuate the wounded, in particular if I'd lived in Hong Kong, where 30 floor buildings are the rule, rather than the exception.

Peter

[Deeman]

Turing secret features.