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Alan Mathison Turing

June 23 1912 - June 7th 1954 (41yrs)

Born in London, died in Manchester

The headmistress at St Michael’s Primary School in Hastings stated: “I have had clever boys and hard-working boys, but Alan Turing is a genius.” Alan was 9 at the time (1921)

Took to learning theoretical mathematics on his own since his school (Sherborne School) prioritized the classics– Greek, Latin, over math and science.

After Sherbourne he went on to study at Kings College (Cambridge) in 1931.

He graduated in 1934, and was elected a fellow at said college for his research on the ‘Probability Theory’.

During his time at Sherborne he preferred solitary sports like Golf and Long Distance Running. His interest in long distance running grew and he got better and better. In August 1947 he took part in the Amateur Athletics Association Championships held at Loughborough College Stadium in Leicestershire. In this race he came 5th in the men’s marathon championship with a time of 2:46:03. He almost got chosen for the men's marathon at the 1948 London Olympic Games. It is said that he would've been selected had he not contracted fibrositis the previous January. The men’s marathon that year was won by Delfo Cabrera from Argentina, with a time of 2:34:51.6.

Alan's brother John stated that “I cannot forebear to remark that the whole business was yet another unpredictable eccentricity for he had never shown the slightest interest in athletics before, yet he was, at the age of 35, in the front rank of marathon runners and seriously considered for the Wembley Olympics.”

His then running partner Alan Garner (author of The Owl Service) said that Alan Turing “used running to think.”

In 1936 he published a paper (On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem) that became the foundation for computer programming.

The Entscheidungsproblem: “Can we build a machine that can always tell whether a math question is true or false?” Alan Turing showed that the answer is no. He proved that some questions are too complicated, and no machine can always decide the answer for every possible question. So the idea is: Some problems can never be fully solved by a machine, no matter how smart it is.

Later the same year he moved to Princeton University to study for a Ph.D. in mathematical logic– he completed it in 1938. His supervisor was Alonzo Church.

The Turing Machine:

A Turing machine is a theoretical model invented by Alan Turing in 1936. It is not a real machine, but an idea used to understand what computers can and cannot do.

The machine has an infinite tape divided into squares. Each square can hold a symbol or be blank. A read-write head moves along the tape, reading symbols, writing new ones, erasing them, and moving left or right. The machine follows a set of simple rules and works step by step, changing its internal state as it goes.

Turing used this model to study the limits of computation. He proved that no algorithmic machine can solve every problem. Some problems cause the machine to run forever and never stop– this is called the Halting Problem.

The idea of the Turing machine is important because it shows the basic structure behind all modern computers: input, memory, instructions, and processing.

Having returned to his fellowship at Kings College in 1938, he went on to join the Government Code and Cypher School. In 1939 (at the outbreak of WW2), he moved to GC&CS’s wartime headquarters– Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire.

A few weeks before his moving to Bletchley Park, the Polish Government had given Britain and France details of the Polish success against Enigma.

Enigma was a device used by the Nazi German military to send out strategic messages before and during WW2.

Enigma sent out cryptic messages. There were about 10²³ different possible Enigma settings, so if they had 20 men trying out one different possibility a minute, it would take them about 20 million years. They needed to do it in under a day. Why? Well, the code changed each 24 hours, and they got each message at about 6 in the morning, leaving about 18 hours to decipher it.

During the autumn of 1939, and spring of 1940, a team led by Turing designed a code breaking machine called the ‘Bombe’.

Bombes supplied the Allies with large quantities of military intelligence. By 1942 the decoders at Bletchley Park were decoding about 39,000 messages each month, which rose to 84,000 per month– two messages every minute, day and night.

His work at Bletchley Park is estimated to have shortened the war by two to four years, saving millions of lives.

In 1946, Turing was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his work. An (in my opinion) rather low order, seeing as the musician Sir Brian May (Queen) has an CBE– Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, for his work in the music industry and charity work. It was this low because Turing's work was kept a secret until the ‘70s, and wasn’t widely acknowledged until the 1990s.

In 1945, after the war, he was recruited to join the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London to create an electronic computer. He designed the first Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), an electronic stored-program all-purpose digital computer. Had the ACE been built as he’d planned, it would've had vastly more memory than any of the other early ‘computers’, and been faster. Sadly, his colleagues at NPL considered the engineering too difficult to attempt, and instead they built a much smaller machine, the Pilot Model ACE (1950).

NPL lost the race to build the first ever working electronic stored-program all-purpose digital computer, this honour went to the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester in June 1948.

Turing was discouraged by the delays at NPL and took up directorship of the Computing Machine Laboratory that year (there was no previous leader). His earlier concept of the Turing Machine, had been an influence on the Manchester Computer Project from the beginning.

After his arrival at Manchester, his main contributions to the computer’s development were to design an input-output system, he did so using Bletchley Park technology, and to design its programming system.

He also wrote the first-ever programming manual, and his programming system was used in the Ferranti Mark I, the world's first-ever marketable electronic digital computer (1951).

Turing was a founding father of artificial intelligence (AI), and modern cognitive science. He also believed the hypothesis that the human brain is part of a digital computing machine. He theorized that the cortex is at birth an “unorganised machine” that through “training” becomes organized “into a universal machine, or something like it.” He designed the Turing Test, a test made to decipher whether a computer is thinking or not.

Some modern studies have claimed that there are computers that are capable of passing the Turing Test in many cases, though results depend heavily on how the test is designed. One of these models that have been tested– and passed in some instances, is chatGPT.

In March 1951 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London.

In 1952 he was convicted of “Gross Indecency", in other words, he was convicted for being homosexual– a crime at that time in Britain.

He was sentenced to 12 months of "hormone therapy”, it was that or prison, and by going to prison he wouldn't be able to keep working on his machines. With a criminal record, he would never be able to work for the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)– the British government’s postwar code-breaking centre, ever again.

He spent the rest of his life at Manchester, where he in May 1953 was appointed to a specially created readership in the theory of computing.

Starting in 1951, Turing studied how living things grow and form patterns. In 1952, he wrote a paper (The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis) explaining how simple chemical reactions can create shapes and designs in plants and animals. He used one of the earliest computers, the Ferranti Mark I, to test his ideas.

In the middle of his groundbreaking work, he was found dead in his bed– poisoned by cyanide. The official verdict was suicide, but no motive was ever established. It is often concidered that his death was an after-affect of the “hormone treatment”, that he would’ve spiraled into depression and became suicidal. Yet, he died over a year after the treatment was finished. He had also– according to his close friend Peter Hilton, borne that cruel treatment with “amused fortitude".

To judge by the records, there is no evidence that Turing ever intended to take his own life, nor that the “balance of his mind was disturbed”, as the coroner claimed. In fact, his mental state appears to have been unremarkable at the time. This does however not mean that suicide can be ruled out, there is also a possibility that it was all a mistake– an accident, the result of inhaling cyanide fumes. There's also speculation of murder by the secret services be entirely ruled out, given that Turing knew as much as he did about cryptanalysis at a time when homosexuals were regarded as “threats to national security”.

In the early 21st century, Turing’s treatment for being gay had become infamous. In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown– speaking on behalf of the British Government, publicly apologized for Turing’s “utterly unfair treatment”. Four years later– in 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a Royal Pardon.

This lead to "Turing's Law"(the informal name) in 2017, which is a law that automatically pardoned all dead men that had been convicted for homosexuality, allowed living homosexuals that had been convicted for it to have their convictions removed (disregarded), and it recognised that those convictions never should've existed in the first place.

In a movie called ‘The Imitation Game’, Turing is portrayed as (what many would agree upon) Autistic– more specifically Asperger's Syndrome (which isn't an official diagnosis anymore). Turing was however, never officially diagnosed with Autism, or Aspergers. Some agree that from what is known of him, he was most likely autistic, and some disagree. It is something that cannot be decided, as he is dead. It is up to you to decide what you believe.

In said movie he was also called “arrogant”, “inhuman”, “narcissistic”, and even “a monster”. This couldn't be farther from how the people who knew him described him. He's been described as many things, such as “Intensely sky and kindly”. Donald Michie’s daughter– Susan, says that “Donald never mentioned Alan being arrogant or disliked and I recall him only speaking positively about Turing.”

Some other things about him as a person that the movie gets wrong is:

He's said to “inspire loyalty and affection among those who appreciated his unusual gifts”

He was also “unfailingly generous with his time and expertise, especially towards younger recruits”.

A person worth trusting and giving one's loyalty to.

Repetitively angered and bewildered administration bizarre yet perfectly logical answers to official commands.

The film makes him look like the stereotypical autistic man– more specially the kind of person people think about when they think of Aspergers Syndrome. As I've just proved, that was not the case.

I personally feel like ‘The Imitation Game’ had no right warping his personality like that. No matter if it made him seem more “compelling to the public” or something like that. Alan Turing was a real man, and he was kind.

There's a bunch of other historical facts that are wrong, as you can find in this article by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne - The Real Alan Turing.

Sources:

https://school.eb.co.uk/levels/intermediate/article/Alan-M-Turing/73839

https://www.tnmoc.org/bh-2-the-enigma-machine

https://school.eb.co.uk/levels/intermediate/article/Turing-test/1511

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/entscheidungsproblem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MidJR581irA

The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis

On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem

https://school.eb.co.uk/levels/intermediate/article/Ultra/339080

https://school.eb.co.uk/levels/intermediate/article/Turing-machine/1510

https://school.eb.co.uk/levels/intermediate/article/Enigma/32677

https://turingarchive.kings.cam.ac.uk/about-alan-turing

https://www.mub.eps.manchester.ac.uk/science-engineering/2020/02/20/alan-turing-did-you-know/

https://www.britishlegion.org.uk/get-involved/remembrance/stories/alan-turing-legacy

https://oldshirburnian.org.uk/alan-turings-sporting-life/

https://humsci.stanford.edu/feature/study-finds-chatgpts-latest-bot-behaves-humans-only-better

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2015/01/07/the-real-alan-turing/