"Turing is often considered to be the father of modern computer
science. He provided an influential formalisation of the concept of
the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine. With the Turing
test, meanwhile, he made a significant and characteristically
provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial
intelligence: whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine
is conscious and can think. He later worked at the National Physical
Laboratory, creating one of the first designs for a stored-program
computer, the ACE, although it was never actually built in its full
form. In 1948, he moved to the University of Manchester to work on the
Manchester Mark I, then emerging as one of the world's earliest true
computers."
The Alan Turing
Home Page Who was Alan Turing?
Founder of computer science, mathematician, philosopher,
codebreaker, strange visionary and a gay man before his time:
" Upon British declaration of war on 3 September [1939], Turing took up
full-time work at the wartime cryptanalytic headquarters, Bletchley
Park. The Polish work was limited as it depended upon the very
particular way the Germans had been using the Enigma. One of their
ideas was embodied in a machine called a Bomba. The way forward lay in
Turing's generalisation of the Polish Bombe into a far more powerful
device, capable of breaking any Enigma message where a small portion
of plaintext could be guessed correctly. "
The
Time 100 article, 1999 While addressing a problem in the arcane
field of mathematical logic, he imagined a machine that could mimic
human reasoning. Sound familiar?
"If all Alan Turing had done was answer, in the negative, a vexing
question in the arcane realm of mathematical logic, few nonspecialists
today would have any reason to remember him. But the method Turing
used to show that certain propositions in a closed logical system
cannot be proved within that system a corollary to the proof that
made Kurt Godel famous had enormous consequences in the world at
large. For what this eccentric young Cambridge don did was to dream up
an imaginary machine a fairly simple typewriter-like contraption
capable somehow of scanning, or reading, instructions encoded on a
tape of theoretically infinite length. As the scanner moved from one
square of the tape to the next responding to the sequential
commands and modifying its mechanical response if so ordered the
output of such a process, Turing demonstrated, could replicate logical
human thought.
"The device in this inspired mind-experiment quickly acquired a name:
the Turing machine. "
"Together with another mathematician W G Welchman, Turing developed
the Bombe, a machine based on earlier work by Polish mathematicians,
which from late 1940 was decoding all messages sent by the Enigma
machines of the Luftwaffe. The Enigma machines of the German navy were
much harder to break but this was the type of challenge which Turing
enjoyed. By the middle of 1941 Turing's statistical approach, together
with captured information, had led to the German navy signals being
decoded at Bletchley."
"WHEN YOU COMBINE NAZI STUPIDITY WITH THE GERMAN LOVE OF GOOD ORDER,
YOU AGAIN GET SOMETHING WHICH IS VERY VULNERABLE BECAUSE IT MEANT NOT
ONLY DID THEY SEND OUT THE GREAT STATEMENTS OF THEIR MARVELOUS
VICTORIES EACH DAY, BUT THEYVE SENT THEM OUT AT THE SAME TIME EACH
DAY SO WE COULD IDENTIFY. NOT ONLY DID THEY SEND THEM OUT AT THE SAME
TIME EACH DAY, BUT THEY SENT THEM OUT ON EVERY CHANNEL. SO IF WE WERE
READING ONE CIPHER WE WOULD GET THE CLEAR AND WE WOULD USE THAT CLEAR
TO OBTAIN KEY FOR ANOTHER CIPHER."
"BECAUSE OF THIS ARROGANCE, BECAUSE THEY DESPISED US SO MUCH, THEY
HELD US IN SUCH CONTEMPT. THEY COULDNT THINK THAT WE, THE UNTER
MENCH, THE SUB-RACE, COULD POSSIBLY BE DECIPHERING MESSAGES ENCIPHERED
BY THE UBER MENCH, THE SUPER RACE. I MEAN IT WAS JUST CONTRARY TO
THEIR WHOLE PHILOSOPHY, AND THANK GOODNESS FOR THAT."
"In October 1941, a letter written by Alan Turing [and three others]
addressed to Winston Churchill was handed in at 10 Downing
Street. [It] requested Churchill to order a substantial increase in
the Bletchley Park staff of cryptanalysts working on high-grade German
ciphers."
"To his great credit, Churchill ignored the unorthodoxy of the
approach, bypassing 'normal channels,' and initialed a minute to
General Ismay demanding immediate action. This minute led eventually
to the recruitment of a very fine team of young - and not so young -
mathematicians to Bletchley Park, to work on decoding messages
enciphered on the Enigma machine...""
Peter Hilton died on November 6, 2010. Here is
his obituary published that week
in the English newspaperThe Telegraph. Here is
a more
extensive one published by the AMS a year later.
September 10, 2009. Prime Minister Gordon apologizes
posthumously to Alan Turing on behalf of the British government.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered
a posthumous apology Friday to Alan Turing, a World War II
code-breaker who was later prosecuted for being gay. The apology came
following an online petition started by computer scientist John
Graham-Cumming, author of The Geek Atlas. Graham-Cumming says Turing
is one of the great figures of mathematics and science in the 20th
century.
Gordon Brown: I'm proud to say sorry to a real war
hero. His letter to the Telegraph, a leading UK newspaper.
"I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer
scientists, historians and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender) activists, we have this year a chance to mark and
celebrate another contribution to Britain's fight against the darkness
of dictatorship: that of code-breaker Alan Turing."