Alan Turing at the time of his election to Fellowsh...

Alan Tur­ing, at the time of his elec­tion to Fel­low­ship of the Royal Soci­ety. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yes­ter­day, June 23, 2012, was the one hun­dredth anniver­sary of the birth of Alan Tur­ing. If you’ve never heard of him, you need to know.

He is one of the rea­sons we are able to com­mu­ni­cate on the Inter­net. With­out Alan Tur­ing, the mod­ern com­puter would not exist.

He is one of the rea­sons Hitler did not con­quer Eng­land. With­out Alan Tur­ing, the Nazis may have won the Sec­ond World War.

He was a pio­neer in the field of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, before there were com­put­ers capa­ble of even approach­ing the idea. With­out Alan Tur­ing, I could not have writ­ten my first pub­lished novel.

He was a genius and a war hero. He was a sci­en­tist and a Fel­low of the Royal Soci­ety. He died in 1954, at the age of 41, from cyanide poi­son­ing. His death was ini­tially ruled a sui­cide, and has been so viewed for 58 years. Yes­ter­day, at a con­fer­ence at Oxford, his­to­rian Jack Copeland ques­tioned that conclusion.

His death may have been acci­den­tal. Whether Tur­ing killed him­self, or whether he died from care­less­ness, either way, his death mat­ters. His life mat­tered. The world is poorer for his loss. You should care about this, for his life says some­thing — I don’t know what, but some­thing — about the soci­ety we live in and the world we are creating.

I won’t try to give a full biog­ra­phy. I can’t do his life jus­tice in the space of a sin­gle small blog post. I will hit a few high­lights to give an impres­sion of this bril­liant and com­plex man.

As a com­puter geek and a soft­ware con­sul­tant, I owe my pro­fes­sion and my hob­bies to Tur­ing. In 1937, he designed and described the the­o­ret­i­cal con­cepts that led to the dig­i­tal com­puter. His design is called the Tur­ing Machine. It’s a con­cep­tual con­struct — it would be imprac­ti­cal to build, and Tur­ing never intended that such a machine could ever actu­ally exist. His achieve­ment was to lay out the the­o­ret­i­cal require­ments of a dig­i­tal computer.

Tur­ing defined the idea of “algo­rithm”, a series of basic com­mands and log­i­cal steps that could be encoded and stored within a mechan­i­cal device, a set of func­tions that could be used to solve a prob­lem or cal­cu­late an answer to a ques­tion. All mod­ern com­put­ing relies on these ideas. In a very real sense, Tur­ing invented the computer.

Dur­ing the Sec­ond World War, Tur­ing worked for the Gov­ern­ment Code and Cypher School (GCCS), later known as the Gov­ern­ment Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Head­quar­ters (GCHQ), a branch of the British intel­li­gence ser­vice that deals with code­break­ing. Tur­ing was instru­men­tal in break­ing Germany’s most pow­er­ful code, the Enigma Code, by which the Axis com­mu­ni­cated secret mil­i­tary mes­sages. Armed with the abil­ity to read these mes­sages, the Allies were able to antic­i­pate many Nazi moves, and to respond quickly and some­times pre­emp­tively. The details of much of this remain secret to this day, and Turing’s involve­ment is not widely appreciated.

After the war, Tur­ing worked at Britain’s National Phys­i­cal Lab­o­ra­tory, and then at Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­sity, and helped to build the first elec­tronic com­put­ers. In those days, com­put­ers were enor­mous, expen­sive, and clumsy — but they worked, and they worked because of Tur­ing. He began to think about the lim­its of arti­fi­cial com­put­ers (as opposed to the “nat­ural com­put­ers” that we have inside our heads). He drew a dis­tinc­tion between com­pu­ta­tion and intel­li­gence, and he defined a test that could be used to deter­mine whether a com­puter is truly intelligent.

This is a beau­ti­ful and ele­gant idea. It has come to be known as the Tur­ing Test. Put a com­puter in one room, and a human in another. Pro­vide a sec­ond human, a “tester”, with a way of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with both — today, we would per­haps envi­sion a chat pro­gram. If the tester is unable to tell which is the human and which is the com­puter, then the com­puter has achieved human lev­els of intelligence.

The Turing Test, version 2, as described by Al...

The Tur­ing Test, ver­sion 2, as described by Alan Tur­ing in “Com­put­ing Machin­ery and Intel­li­gence” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Put it another way. Imag­ine you call your local pizza place to get din­ner. Maybe some­one answers the phone, and takes your order. Maybe you like that person’s voice — she sounds pretty cute, but she makes a mis­take adding up your order, and you keep her on the line to cor­rect it. You get into a con­ver­sa­tion about the weather, and about the movie you saw last night, or maybe how your local base­ball team is doing these days. She’s bright and funny. You’re intrigued, and ask her out for a date. Then she tells you, “I’m sorry, I’m a com­puter pro­gram. I can’t date you. But your pizza will be there in twenty minutes.”

If you can’t tell the dif­fer­ence between a com­puter and a human, then you may have found a com­puter that has passed the Tur­ing Test. Would such a com­puter be alive and con­scious? How could you tell? Tur­ing asked those ques­tions, but didn’t attempt to pro­vide a final answer for them. What he did do was define what to look for in true arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, long before any com­puter could approach such capabilities.

Bril­liant math­e­mati­cian and philoso­pher, unsung war hero, com­puter pio­neer, Tur­ing got into trou­ble with the law. In 1952, he reported a bur­glary in his home. As part of the inves­ti­ga­tion, police dis­cov­ered he had a male lover.  Homo­sex­u­al­ity was ille­gal in Britain in 1952, and Tur­ing was charged with “acts of gross inde­cency.” Rather than accept a prison sen­tence and loss of his posi­tion at Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­sity — which would have meant los­ing access to what was then one of the world’s few exist­ing com­put­ers — Tur­ing accepted a form of chem­i­cal cas­tra­tion, mas­sive injec­tions of female hor­mones, to kill his sex drive.

He lived with this sen­tence for a year. In 1953, a gay Nor­we­gian acquain­tance sent him a post­card to let him know he’d visit soon. The friend never showed up, and there are rumors, but no hard evi­dence, con­cern­ing what hap­pened to him.

On June 7, 1954, Tur­ing was found dead by his house­keeper, a half-​​eaten apple by his bed­side. The coro­ner con­cluded he had died from cyanide poi­son­ing, and assumed the apple had been poi­soned (though it was never tested) and that Turn­ing had killed him­self (though he had never hinted to any­one that he intended sui­cide). The coro­ner said, “In a man of his type, one never knows what his men­tal processes are going to do next.” He didn’t have to expand upon “a man of his type”; it was assumed that homo­sex­u­als were unbalanced.

Now, nearly sixty years later, Tur­ing expert Jack Copeland has reopened the ques­tion of sui­cide. Tur­ing was a man of many inter­ests, and he had cyanide in his home at the time for some chem­i­cal exper­i­ments he was con­duct­ing. There is the pos­si­bil­ity his death was an acci­dent. (Any­one who wants to spec­u­late on any other pos­si­bil­i­ties would not nec­es­sar­ily be unjus­ti­fied in doing so.)

Tur­ing con­tributed a great deal to the world we live in today, yet his legacy remains rel­a­tively obscure. Few of the peo­ple who ben­e­fit from his work even know his name, though he pro­foundly altered our world. Every time you turn on your com­puter, use your smart­phone, or acknowl­edge the results of the Sec­ond World War, you owe a debt to Alan Tur­ing. His reward was to spend the last two years of his life under a cloud, for hav­ing the audac­ity to love peo­ple who had the same kind of gen­i­talia he did.

We need to treat our heroes better.

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