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I. J. Good

 
Artist: Jack Good
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Jack Good

Formal Connection With:

Lord Rockingham's XI
  • Active: '50s, '60s
  • Genres: Rock
  • Instrument: Producer

Biography

Today, the name Jack Good is relatively little known outside of England. But there was a time when Jack Good was one of the most influential musical figures on television anywhere in the world, this side of Ed Sullivan, and the most important music producer on American television. Good was born in London in 1931 and seemed an unlikely candidate for music impresario -- he attended Oxford University, where he was president of the drama society. But then he took off in some directions all his own, including a stint as a stand-up comic, and joined the BBC. Good and Josephine Douglas became producers of the service's Six-Five Special, a youth-oriented television variety show whose premiere, in the wake of the explosion of rock & roll in British popular culture, turned it into one of the most watched programs in England among the nation's teenagers. It was during the course of producing the Six-Five Special that Good -- born 24 years before the music's advent, and seemingly on the "wrong" side of the Atlantic -- became a fervent exponent of rock & roll. He also found the series and the BBC management's emphasis on more general music as well as comedy and variety acts, to be increasingly unsatisfying and unfulfilling. Good left the BBC in 1958 for greener pastures at England's fledgling ITV network. It was there that he came into his own as a producer by creating Oh Boy!, a weekly series devoted entirely to rock & roll, for which he was able to sign up many of the best new acts in the country -- not just budding stars such as Marty Wilde and Cliff Richard, but also groups such as Don Lang & His Frantic Five, Neville Taylor & the Cutters, and the Vernons Girls. All of them became stars in their own right, separate from (although occasionally in tandem with) any recording contracts. In addition to the quality of its musical talent, the show's secret was its pacing, which was so brisk as acts were moved on- and off-stage, that studio audiences couldn't keep up with the transitions -- and home audiences were totally dazzled; Oh Boy! was the first television rock & roll showcase to achieve a level of excitement akin to the music itself. Good was also responsible in a very direct way for launching Cliff Richard to stardom, an achievement that (regardless of what one thinks of Richard as an artist) proved that England could produce a genuine rock & roll star of its own. The singer's debut single had been issued by EMI's Columbia label with the ballad side, "Schoolboy Crush," as the A-side. On hearing it, however, Good lobbied the label to flip the single over to its much harder-rocking B-side, "Move It," and insisted on featuring that side on his broadcasts. "Move It" -- which was also vitally important as an original song by Ian Samwell (a founding member of Richard's backing band, the Shadows) -- became Richard's breakthrough hit, establishing him as England's premiere homegrown rock & roll star. There would be better and different kinds of artists following in his wake, but without that breakthrough, it's arguable that a whole second generation of British rock & rollers might well have been sidetracked. His next series, Boy Meets Girl, was less notable for its musical impact, though it did give Cockney rockabilly artist Joe Brown his break to stardom. By that time, however, Good had moved from television into music production in a serious way, with Billy Fury's renowned Sound of Fury 10" LP, an extraordinary rock & roll-cum-rockabilly showcase (fans of whom included a young Keith Richards). Good went to the United States in the early 1960s, where he returned to his old interest in drama, appearing on Broadway in The Affair, among other stage roles. He produced a pilot for a proposed television series, attracting little interest from the networks, but he was a little early in trying to make an impact on this side of the Atlantic. His career received a fresh boost when Beatles' manager Brian Epstein chose Good to produce Around the Beatles -- at a time when anyone and anything that the Beatles or their manager looked upon with favor was as good an endorsement as anyone could get. In 1964, Good went to work with ABC as producer of Shindig, which proved to be television's premiere, prime-time, weekly rock & roll showcase -- the series was as influential in America as Oh Boy! had been in England and, as a product of 1965's popular culture, exerted a worldwide influence on music, despite its only being shown in America. By its second year, Good had moved on to other challenges, including the rock & roll adaptation of Othello, entitled Catch My Soul, which was turned into a star vehicle for Good on London's West End (with P.J. Proby as Iago). He also produced specials by pop singer Andy Williams and, perhaps most importantly, for the Monkees (33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee), and a network rock special that featured Jethro Tull, the Nice, and Ray Charles. He also worked in an appearance as an actor in the Elvis Presley movie Clambake and later did a biographical stage production entitled Elvis. He later revived Oh Boy! on-stage and brought it to television -- and then, in a dizzying string of changes in his life's course, became a painter and spent a period in a religious order preparing to become a monk. He reemerged as one of England's elder statesmen of rock & roll with the autobiographical musical Good Rockin' Tonite. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide
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Wikipedia: I. J. Good
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Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Wikipedia
Irving John ("I.J.") Good
Born 9 December 1916(1916-12-09)
London, England, UK
Died April 5, 2009 (aged 92)
Radford, Virginia, USA
Fields Statistician, cryptologist
Institutions Trinity College, Oxford; Virginia Tech
Alma mater Jesus College, Cambridge

Irving John ("I.J."; "Jack") Good (9 December 1916 – 5 April 2009)[1][2] was a British statistician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park.

He was born Isadore Jacob Gudak to a Polish-Jewish family in London. He later anglicized his name to Irving John Good and signed his publications "I. J. Good."

An originator of the concept now known as "technological singularity," Good served as consultant on supercomputers to Stanley Kubrick, director of the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Contents

Life

Good was born Isadore Jacob Gudak to Polish-Jewish parents in London. His father was a watchmaker, who later managed and owned a successful fashionable jewelry shop, and was also a notable Yiddish writer writing under the pen-name of Moshe Oved. Good was educated at the Haberdashers' Aske's boys' school in Hampstead, north London, where, Dan van der Vat writes, Good effortlessly outpaced the mathematics curriculum.[3]

Good studied mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating in 1938 and winning the Smith's Prize in 1940. He did research under G.H. Hardy and Besicovitch before moving to Bletchley Park in 1941 on completing his doctorate.

On 27 May 1941, having just obtained his doctorate at Cambridge, Good walked into Hut 8, Bletchley's facility for breaking German naval ciphers, for his first shift. This was the day that Britain's Royal Navy destroyed the German battleship Bismarck after it had sunk the Royal Navy's HMS Hood. Bletchley had contributed to Bismarck's destruction by discovering, through wireless-traffic analysis, that the German flagship was sailing for Brest, France, rather than Wilhelmshaven, from which she had set out.[3] Hut 8 had not, however, been able to decrypt on a current basis the 22 German Naval Enigma messages that had been sent to Bismarck. The German Navy's Enigma ciphers 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.[3]

Alan Turing... had caught Good sleeping on the floor while on duty during his first night shift. At first, Turing thought Good was ill, but he was cross when Good explained that he was just taking a short nap because he was tired. For days afterwards, Turing would not deign to speak to Good, and he left the room if Good walked in. The new recruit only won Turing's respect after he solved the bigram tables problem. During a subsequent night shift, when there was no more work to be done, it dawned on Good that there might be another chink in the German indicating system. The German telegraphists had to add dummy letters to the trigrams which they selected out of the kenngruppenbuch... Good wondered if their choice of dummy letters was random, or whether there was a bias towards particular letters. After inspecting some messages which had been broken, he discovered that there was a tendency to use some letters more than others. That being the case, all the codebreakers had to do, was to work back from the indicators given at the beginning of each message, and apply each bigram table in turn in the same way as Joan Clarke had done before. The bigram table which produced one of the popular dummy letters was probably the correct one. When Good mentioned his discovery to Alan Turing, Turing was very embarrassed, and said, 'I could have sworn that I tried that.' It quickly became an important part of the Banburismus procedure.

Jack Good's refusal to go on working when tired was vindicated by a subsequent incident. During another long night shift, he had been baffled by his failure to break a doubly enciphered Offizier message. This was one of the messages which was supposed to be enciphered initially with the Enigma set up in accordance with the Offizier settings, and subsequently with the general Enigma settings in place. However, while he was sleeping before returning for another shift, he dreamed that the order had been reversed; the general settings had been applied before the Offizier settings. Next day he found that the message had yet to be read, so he applied the theory which had come to him during the night. It worked; he had broken the code in his sleep.[4]

Good served with Turing for nearly two years.[3]

Subsequently he worked with Donald Michie in Max Newman's group on the Fish ciphers, leading to the development of the Colossus computer. In 1947 Newman invited Good to join him and Turing at Manchester University. There for three years Good lectured in mathematics and researched computers, including the Manchester Mark 1.[3]

In 1948 Good was recruited by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), successor to Bletchley Park. He remained there until 1959, while also taking up a brief associate professorship at Princeton University and a short consultancy with IBM.[3]

From 1959 until he moved to the U.S. in 1967, Good held government-funded positions and from 1964 a senior research fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford, and the Atlas Computer Laboratory, where he continued his interests in computing, statistics and chess.[2] He later left Oxford, declaring it "a little stiff".

In 1967 Good moved to the United States, where he was appointed a research professor of statistics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. In 1969 he was appointed a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, and in 2004 Emeritus University Distinguished Professor.

Good's published work ran to over three million words.[3] He was known for his work on Bayesian statistics. He published a number of books on probability theory. In 1958 he published an early version of what later became known as the Fast Fourier Transform[5] but in a journal so obscure that it never became widely known. He played chess to county standard and helped popularize Go, an Asian boardgame, through a 1965 article in New Scientist (he had learned the rules from Alan Turing).[6] In 1965 he originated the concept now known as "technological singularity," which anticipates the eventual advent of superhuman intelligence:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. [7]

Good's authorship of treatises such as "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine" and "Logic of Man and Machine" (both 1965) made him the obvious person for Stanley Kubrick to consult when filming 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), one of whose principal characters was the paranoid HAL 9000 supercomputer.[3] In 1995 Good was elected a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.[2]

The slender, bushy-moustached Good was blessed with a sense of humor. He published a paper under the names IJ Good and "K Caj Doog"—the latter, his own nickname spelled backwards. In a 1988 paper,[8] he introduced its subject by reviewing other works, mainly his own, on the grounds that "I have read them all carefully." In Virginia he chose, as his vanity license plate, "007IJG," in subtle reference to his World War II intelligence work.[3]

Good died on 5 April 2009 of natural causes in Radford, Virginia, aged 92.[9]

Books

  • Probability and Weighting of Evidence (1950), Griffin, London.
  • Information, Weight of Evidence: The Singularity Between Probability Measures and Signal Detection (1974) with D.B. Osteyee, Springer, ISBN 978-3540067269.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "Passings". Los Angeles Times. April 13, 2009. http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-passings13-2009apr13,0,3844936.story. Retrieved April 13, 2009. 
  2. ^ a b c London Times of 16-apr-09, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6100314.ece
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i Dan van der Vat, "Jack Good" (obituary), The Guardian, 29 April 2009, p. 32.
  4. ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, Enigma: The Battle for the Code, p. 189.
  5. ^ "The Interaction Algorithm and Practical Fourier Analysis," J. Royal Statistical Society (1958), Ser.B., Vol.20,pp.361-372.
  6. ^ "The mystery of Go," The New Scientist, January 1965, pp. 172-74.
  7. ^ I.J. Good, "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine", Advances in Computers, vol. 6, 1965.
  8. ^ I.J. Good, "The Interface Between Statistics and Philosophy of Science," Statistical Science, vol. 3, no. 4, 1988, pp. 386–97.
  9. ^ Virginia Tech news release of Good's death.

References

External links


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