(no subject)

[birdwatcher]

Oracles were apparently first studied by Turing, in his 1938 PhD thesis. Obviously, anyone who could write a whole thesis about these fictitious entities would have to he an extremely pure theorist, someone who wouldn't be caught dead doing anything relevant. That was certainly true in Turing's case - indeed, he spent the years after his PhD, from 1939 to 1943, studying certain abstruse symmetry transformations on a 26-letter alphabet.
-- Scott Aaronson