Irving John Good (9 December 1916 – 5 April 2009)The Times of 16-apr-09, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6100314.ece was a British mathematician who worked as a

cryptologist This is a list of cryptographers. Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties called adversaries. Pre twentieth century * Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi: wrote a (now lost) book ...

Bletchley Park Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allies of World War II, Allied World War II cryptography, code-breaking during the Second World War. The man ...

with

Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical co ...

. After the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

, Good continued to work with Turing on the design of computers and

Bayesian statistics Bayesian statistics is a theory in the field of statistics based on the Bayesian interpretation of probability where probability expresses a ''degree of belief'' in an event. The degree of belief may be based on prior knowledge about the event, ...

at the

University of Manchester , mottoeng = Knowledge, Wisdom, Humanity , established = 2004 – University of Manchester Predecessor institutions: 1956 – UMIST (as university college; university 1994) 1904 – Victoria University of Manchester 1880 – Victoria Unive ...

. Good moved to the United States where he was professor at

Virginia Tech Virginia Tech (formally the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and informally VT, or VPI) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. It also has educational facilities in six re ...

. He was born Isadore Jacob Gudak to a

Polish Jewish The history of the Jews in Poland dates back at least 1,000 years. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Ashkenazi Jewish community in the world. Poland was a principal center of Jewish culture, because of the lo ...

family in London. He later anglicised his name to Irving John Good and signed his publications "I. J. Good." An originator of the concept now known as "

intelligence explosion The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. According to the ...

," Good served as consultant on supercomputers to

Stanley Kubrick Stanley Kubrick (; July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and photographer. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, his films, almost all of which are adaptations of nove ...

, director of the 1968 film '' 2001: A Space Odyssey''.

Life

Good was born Isadore Jacob Gudak to Polish

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""T ...

parents in London. His father was a watchmaker, who later managed and owned a successful fashionable jewellery shop, and was also a notable Yiddish writer writing under the

pen name A pen name, also called a ''nom de plume'' or a literary double, is a pseudonym (or, in some cases, a variant form of a real name) adopted by an author and printed on the title page or by-line of their works in place of their real name. A pen na ...

of Moshe Oved. Good was educated at the Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, at the time in

Hampstead Hampstead () is an area in London, which lies northwest of Charing Cross, and extends from the A5 road (Roman Watling Street) to Hampstead Heath, a large, hilly expanse of parkland. The area forms the northwest part of the London Borough of ...

in northwest London, where, according to Dan van der Vat, Good effortlessly outpaced the mathematics

curriculum In education, a curriculum (; : curricula or curriculums) is broadly defined as the totality of student experiences that occur in the educational process. The term often refers specifically to a planned sequence of instruction, or to a view ...

. Good studied mathematics at

Jesus College, Cambridge Jesus College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college's full name is The College of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint John the Evangelist and the glorious Virgin Saint Radegund, near Cambridge. Its common name comes f ...

, graduating in 1938 and winning the

Smith's Prize The Smith's Prize was the name of each of two prizes awarded annually to two research students in mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge from 1769. Following the reorganization in 1998, they are now awarded under the ...

in 1940. He did research under

G.H. Hardy Godfrey Harold Hardy (7 February 1877 – 1 December 1947) was an English mathematician, known for his achievements in number theory and mathematical analysis. In biology, he is known for the Hardy–Weinberg principle, a basic principle of po ...

and

Abram Besicovitch Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch (or Besikovitch) (russian: link=no, Абра́м Само́йлович Безико́вич; 23 January 1891 – 2 November 1970) was a Russian mathematician, who worked mainly in England. He was born in Berdyansk ...

before moving to Bletchley Park in 1941 on completing his doctorate.

Bletchley Park

On 27 May 1941, having just obtained his doctorate at Cambridge, Good walked into

Hut 8 Hut 8 was a section in the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park (the British World War II codebreaking station, located in Buckinghamshire) tasked with solving German naval (Kriegsmarine) Enigma messages. The section was ...

, Bletchley's facility for breaking German naval ciphers, for his first shift. This was the day that Britain's

Royal Navy The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against ...

destroyed the after it had sunk the Royal Navy's . Bletchley had contributed to ''Bismarck''s destruction by discovering, through wireless-traffic analysis, that the German flagship was sailing for

Brest, France Brest (; ) is a port city in the Finistère department, Brittany. Located in a sheltered bay not far from the western tip of the peninsula, and the western extremity of metropolitan France, Brest is an important harbour and the second French ...

, rather than

Wilhelmshaven Wilhelmshaven (, ''Wilhelm's Harbour''; Northern Low Saxon: ''Willemshaven'') is a coastal town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is situated on the western side of the Jade Bight, a bay of the North Sea, and has a population of 76,089. Wilhelmsh ...

, from which she had set out. Hut 8 had not, however, been able to decrypt on a current basis the 22 German Naval

Enigma Enigma may refer to: *Riddle, someone or something that is mysterious or puzzling Biology *ENIGMA, a class of gene in the LIM domain Computing and technology * Enigma (company), a New York-based data-technology startup * Enigma machine, a family ...

messages that had been sent to ''Bismarck''. The German Navy's Enigma cyphers were considerably more secure than those of the German Army or Air Force, which had been well penetrated by 1940. Naval messages were taking three to seven days to decrypt, which usually made them operationally useless for the British. This was about to change, however, with Good's help. Good served with Turing for nearly two years. Subsequently, he worked with

Donald Michie Donald Michie (; 11 November 1923 – 7 July 2007) was a British researcher in artificial intelligence. During World War II, Michie worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, contributing to the effort to solve " Tunn ...

Max Newman Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman, FRS, (7 February 1897 – 22 February 1984), generally known as Max Newman, was a British mathematician and codebreaker. His work in World War II led to the construction of Colossus, the world's first operati ...

's group on the

Fish Fish are aquatic, craniate, gill-bearing animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish as well as various extinct related groups. Approximately 95% of liv ...

cipher In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is ''encipherment''. To encipher or encode ...

s, leading to the development of the

Colossus computer Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossu ...

. Good was a member of the Bletchley Chess Club which defeated the

Oxford University Chess Club The Oxford University Chess Club (OUCC) was founded at the University of Oxford in 1869.

8–4 in a twelve-board team match held on 2 December 1944. Good played fourth board for Bletchley Park, with C.H.O'D. Alexander,

Harry Golombek Harry Golombek OBE (1 March 1911 – 7 January 1995) was a British chess player, chess author, and wartime codebreaker. He was three times British chess champion, in 1947, 1949, and 1955 and finished second in 1948. He was born in Lambeth ...

and James Macrae Aitken in the top three spots. He won his game against Sir Robert Robinson.

Postwar work

In 1947 Newman invited Good to join him and Turing at

Manchester University , mottoeng = Knowledge, Wisdom, Humanity , established = 2004 – University of Manchester Predecessor institutions: 1956 – UMIST (as university college; university 1994) 1904 – Victoria University of Manchester 1880 – Victoria Unive ...

. There for three years Good lectured in mathematics and researched computers, including the

Manchester Mark 1 The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest stored-program computers, developed at the Victoria University of Manchester, England from the Manchester Baby (operational in June 1948). Work began in August 1948, and the first version was operat ...

. In 1948 Good was recruited by the Government Communications Headquarters (

GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters, commonly known as GCHQ, is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the Unit ...

), successor to

. He remained there until 1959, while also taking up a brief associate professorship at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

and a short consultancy with IBM. From 1959 until he moved to the US in 1967, Good held government-funded positions and from 1964 a senior research fellowship at

Trinity College, Oxford (That which you wish to be secret, tell to nobody) , named_for = The Holy Trinity , established = , sister_college = Churchill College, Cambridge , president = Dame Hilary Boulding , location = Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3BH , coordinat ...

, and the

Atlas Computer Laboratory The Atlas Computer Laboratory on the Harwell, Oxfordshire campus shared by the Harwell Laboratory was one of the major computer laboratories in the world, which operated between 1961 and 1975 to provide a service to British scientists at a ti ...

, where he continued his interests in computing, statistics and chess. He later left Oxford, declaring it "a little stiff".

United States

In 1967 Good moved to the United States, where he was appointed a research professor of statistics at

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Virginia Tech (formally the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and informally VT, or VPI) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. It also has educational facilities in six regi ...

. In 1969 he was appointed a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, and in 1994 Emeritus University Distinguished Professor. In 1973 he was elected as a

Fellow of the American Statistical Association Like many other academic professional societies, the American Statistical Association (ASA) uses the title of Fellow of the American Statistical Association as its highest honorary grade of membership. The number of new fellows per year is limited ...

. He later said about his arrival in Virginia (from Britain) in 1967 to start teaching at VPI, where he taught from 1967 to 1994:

Research and publications

Good's published work ran to over three million words. He was known for his work on

Kass KASS is a commercial radio station located in Casper, Wyoming, broadcasting on 106.9 FM Broadcasting, FM. KASS airs a classic rock music format, branded as "Kick 107". The music programming is Radio syndication, syndicated by Westwood One (curre ...

and Raftery credit Good (and in turn Turing) with coining the term ''

Bayes factor The Bayes factor is a ratio of two competing statistical models represented by their marginal likelihood, and is used to quantify the support for one model over the other. The models in questions can have a common set of parameters, such as a nul ...

''. Good published a number of books on

probability theory Probability theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with probability. Although there are several different probability interpretations, probability theory treats the concept in a rigorous mathematical manner by expressing it through a set ...

. In 1958 he published an early version of what later became known as the

fast Fourier transform A fast Fourier transform (FFT) is an algorithm that computes the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of a sequence, or its inverse (IDFT). Fourier analysis converts a signal from its original domain (often time or space) to a representation in the ...

but it did not become widely known. He played

chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to dis ...

to county standard and helped popularise Go, an Asian boardgame, through a 1965 article in ''

New Scientist ''New Scientist'' is a magazine covering all aspects of science and technology. Based in London, it publishes weekly English-language editions in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. An editorially separate organisation publishe ...

'' (he had learned the rules from Alan Turing). In 1965 he originated the concept now known as "

" or the "

technological singularity The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. According to the ...

", which anticipates the eventual advent of superhuman intelligence: Good's authorship of treatises such as his 1965 "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine" and "Logic of Man and Machine" made him the obvious person for

to consult when filming '' 2001: A Space Odyssey'' (1968), one of whose principal characters was the paranoid

HAL 9000 HAL 9000 is a fictional artificial intelligence character and the main antagonist in Arthur C. Clarke's ''Space Odyssey'' series. First appearing in the 1968 film '' 2001: A Space Odyssey'', HAL ( Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer ...

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

. In 1995 Good was elected a member of the

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS, often pronounced ; also known as simply the Academy or the Motion Picture Academy) is a professional honorary organization with the stated goal of advancing the arts and sciences of motio ...

Graphcore Graphcore is a British semiconductor company that develops accelerators for AI and machine learning. It aims to make a massively parallel Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) that holds the complete machine learning model inside the processor. Hi ...

's proposed foundation model $600m computer, that uses Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, which will have the potential capacity of running programs with 500trn parameters, was named to honor Good's intellectual heritage.The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence's (HAI) Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM) describes foundation models as "models trained on broad data at scale...

hat A hat is a head covering which is worn for various reasons, including protection against weather conditions, ceremonial reasons such as university graduation, religious reasons, safety, or as a fashion accessory. Hats which incorporate mecha ...

will not only transform how AI systems are built, but will also lead to significant societal consequences." Examples of foundational models include BERT,

GPT-3 Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. Given an initial text as prompt, it will produce text that continues the prompt. The architecture is a standard ...

, CLIP, and

Codex The codex (plural codices ) was the historical ancestor of the modern book. Instead of being composed of sheets of paper, it used sheets of vellum, papyrus, or other materials. The term ''codex'' is often used for ancient manuscript books, with ...

. According to

The Economist ''The Economist'' is a British weekly newspaper printed in demitab format and published digitally. It focuses on current affairs, international business, politics, technology, and culture. Based in London, the newspaper is owned by The Econ ...

, Graphcore aims to take the "first step" towards creating I. J. Good's imagined "Ultraintelligent Machine". According to his assistant, Leslie Pendleton, in 1998 Good wrote in an unpublished autobiographical statement that he suspected an ultraintelligent machine would lead to the extinction of man.

Personality

Good published a paper under the names IJ Good and "K Caj Doog"—the latter, his own nickname spelled backwards. In a 1988 paper, he introduced its subject by saying, "Many people have contributed to this topic but I shall mainly review the writings of I. J. Good because I have read them all carefully." In

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth are ...

he chose, as his vanity licence plate, "007IJG," in subtle reference to his

intelligence Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can be ...

work. Good never married. After going through ten assistants in his first thirteen years at Virginia Tech, he hired Leslie Pendleton, who proved up to the task of managing his quirks. He wanted to marry her, but she refused. Although there was speculation, they were never more than friends, but she was his assistant, companion, and friend for the rest of his life.

Death

Good died on 5 April 2009 of

natural causes In many legal jurisdictions, the manner of death is a determination, typically made by the coroner, medical examiner, police, or similar officials, and recorded as a vital statistic. Within the United States and the United Kingdom, a disti ...

in Radford, Virginia, aged 92.

Books

* * * * *

Notes

References

Bibliography

* Dan van der Vat, "Jack Good" (obituary), ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'', 29 April 2009, p. 32. * Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, ''Enigma: The Battle for the Code'', London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000, .

External links

*
Good's web page
at Virginia Tech
Bibliography ("Shorter Publications List", running to 2300 items) (PDF)

focusing on Good's role in the history of computing
Project Euclid
An interview with Good can be downloaded from here
VT Image Base
Photographs
Obituary
Virginia Tech, 6 April 2009

''

Daily Telegraph Daily or The Daily may refer to: Journalism * Daily newspaper, newspaper issued on five to seven day of most weeks * ''The Daily'' (podcast), a podcast by ''The New York Times'' * ''The Daily'' (News Corporation), a defunct US-based iPad new ...

'', 10 April 2009
Obituary
''

The Times ''The Times'' is a British Newspaper#Daily, daily Newspaper#National, national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its s ...

'', 16 April 2009
Obituary
''

The Independent ''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publish ...

'', 14 May 2009
Eulogy
Mathematical eulogy (with

Maple ''Acer'' () is a genus of trees and shrubs commonly known as maples. The genus is placed in the family Sapindaceae.Stevens, P. F. (2001 onwards). Angiosperm Phylogeny Website. Version 9, June 2008 nd more or less continuously updated since http ...

code) by

Doron Zeilberger Doron Zeilberger (דורון ציילברגר, born 2 July 1950 in Haifa, Israel) is an Israeli mathematician, known for his work in combinatorics. Education and career He received his doctorate from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1976, ...

, 2 December 2009 {{DEFAULTSORT:Good, I. J. 1916 births 2009 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians 20th-century American philosophers Alan Turing Alumni of Jesus College, Cambridge American people of British-Jewish descent American people of Polish-Jewish descent American statisticians Artificial intelligence researchers Bayesian statisticians British cryptographers British information theorists British people of Polish-Jewish descent English emigrants to the United States English Jews English mathematicians English statisticians Fellows of the American Statistical Association GCHQ people Modern cryptographers Bletchley Park people People educated at Haberdashers' Boys' School People from Hampstead People from Radford, Virginia Singularitarians Theoretical computer scientists Foreign Office personnel of World War II Mathematicians from Virginia American cosmologists