Alan Turing

From Philosopedia

Turing, Alan Mathison (23 June 1912 - 7 June 1954)

A mathematician and cryptographer, Turing introduced the theoretical notion of a "Turing machine," an idealized computer, which laid the foundation for the field of artificial intelligence.

Turing, who was conceived in India where his father - Julius Mathison Turing - worked in the Indian civil service, was born in a nursing home in Paddington, London, then educated in Dorset at Sherborne School. Here, according to Andrew Hodges, he chummed with Christopher Morcom, a year older. The two became inseparable, intrigued that they both enjoyed profound matters like discussing scientific esoterica such as Einstein's relativity theory. Morcom's sudden death in February 1930 was such a blow that friends speculated Turing spent the remainder of his life trying to find someone with whom he similarly could bond.

In 1931 he went to King's College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics and worked in predicate logic. At the age of 22 and with the backing of John Maynard Keynes, Turing was elected a Fellow of King's and invented the abstract computing machines called the Turing machines - the machines had paper tapes, upon which a finite number of binary symbols could be written.

Whether or not Turing's relationship with Morcom was gay, the gay elements at Cambridge, were evident, and wags came up with

Turing

Must have been alluring

To get made a don

So early on.

The Turing Machine

As described by B. J. Copeland,

• A Turing machine consists of a potentially infinite paper tape, on which is written a finite number of discrete (e.g. binary) symbols, and a scanner that moves back and forth along the tape symbol by symbol, reading what it finds and writing further symbols. Turing proved that a single machine, known as the universal Turing machine, can be programmed to simulate any other Turing machine.

A Turing Machine

[Hodges has described Turing's school experiences:

• As an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge from 1931, he entered a world more encouraging to free-ranging thought. His 1932 reading of the then new work of von Neumann on the logical foundations of quantum mechanics, helped the transition from emotional to rigorous intellectual enquiry. At the same time, this was when his homosexuality became a definitive part of his identity. The special ambience of King's College gave him a first real home. His association with the so-called anti-War movement of 1933 did not develop into Marxism, nor into the pacifism of his friend and occasional lover James Atkins, then a fellow undergraduate mathematician, later musician. He was closer in thought to the liberal-left economists J. M. Keynes and A. C. Pigou. His relaxations were found not in the literary circles generally associated with the King's College homosexual milieu, but in rowing, running, and later in sailing a small boat.

According to Hodges.

• By 1933 Turing had already introduced himself to Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica and so to the then arcane area of mathematical logic. Bertrand Russell had thought of logic as a solid foundation for mathematical truth, but many questions had since been raised about how truth could be captured by any formalism. In particular, in 1931 Gödel had shattered Russell's picture by showing the incompleteness of mathematics: the existence of true statements about numbers which could not be proved by the formal application of set rules of deduction. In 1935, Turing learnt from the lecture course of the Cambridge topologist M. H. A. Newman that a further question, posed by Hilbert, still lay open. It was the question of Decidability, the Entscheidungs problem. Could there exist, at least in principle, a definite method or process by which it could be decided whether any given mathematical assertion was provable?

• To answer such a question needed a definition of 'method' which would be not only precise but compelling. This is what Turing supplied. He analysed what could be achieved by a person performing a methodical process, and seizing on the idea of something done 'mechanically', expressed the analysis in terms of a theoretical machine able to perform certain precisely defined elementary operations on symbols on paper tape. He presented convincing arguments that the scope of such a machine was sufficient to encompass everything that would count as a 'definite method.' Daringly he included an argument based on the transitions between 'states of mind' of a human being performing a mental process.

Like other outstanding scientists at the time, Turing spent two years as a graduate student at Princeton, completing his Ph. D. at Princeton (1938).

Breaking the Code of the Germans' Enigma Cipher Machine

During World War II he was instrumental in breaking the code used by the Germans' Enigma cipher machine, which had an alphabetic keyboard next to which was a set of twenty-six little lamps, one for each letter. Press d-o-g, and r-l-u might light up on the lampboard. When r-l-u was sent out in Morse code by a radio operator, the recipient received r-l-u but the Enigma machine read it as d-o-g. To solve the code, Turing with a fellow Cambridge mathematician, W. G. Welchman, came up with a device called the Turing-Welchman Bombe, which made the reading of Luftwaffe signals routine and helped defeat Britain's chief enemy.

The Enigma

After the war he helped the British government (1945-1948) in designing computers. Joining the University of Manchester (1948-1954), he worked on the basis of a newly emerging field of artificial intelligence, coming up with a Turing Test to see whether a computer is capable of humanlike thought. Turing, who had never been attracted to any of the religions, was known for his atheism, a point touted by the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association in Great Britain. Although Turing's thoughts were directed at engineering, he wrote to a friend what essentially is philosophical,

• I am more interested in the possibility of producing models of the action of the brain than in the practical applications of computing.

The Charge of "Gross Indecency"

In Manchester, Turing bought a small house in a suburb, then drove his bicycle ten miles to the university. Observers saw a man dressed in a funny yellow oilskin and hat when it rained. One who saw him in a different light was Arnold Murray, a 19-year-old working-class youth, who not only had dinner with him but also spent the night. When a month later, Turing returned to his house he found it had been burglarized by a friend of Murray who presumably thought a homosexual would not report the loss to the police. Turing did. However, this led to his being charged under the same 1885 act that led to Oscar Wilde's prosecution, that of "gross indecency" which could have resulted in up to two years in jail. The judge (who like everyone else did not know how Turing had cracked the code that had helped Britain during the war) sentenced him to probation and required that he seek medical attention. That involved being given female hormones, which were supposed to correct the homosexual drive but instead led to his libido's drive being destroyed and his breasts temporarily enlarged.

When in 1954 the 41-year-old research scientist was found dead by his housekeeper, it was learned that, the night before, Turing had eaten a few bites from an apple that apparently was laced with cyanide. An inquest ruled he had been a suicide. Doubters, however, countered that his embarrassment of having been outed was two years in the past, that he was happy and productive in 1954, and that they were incredulous that he would have taken his own life. The possibility of clandestine assassination is hinted by the title of a short biography, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer (2006), by the University of Florida's David Leavitt.

After his death, details of his heroic efforts in the fight against Hitler and the Nazis became generally known.

Turing Statue in Bletchley Park

- Stephen Kettle's Statue of Turing

- Detail of the Statue's Head

Sidney E. Frank, an American businessman who became a billionaire through savvy promotion of Grey Goose vodka and Jägermeiste

Bletchley Park, on 19 June 2007, unveiled a statue, specially-commissioned by philanthropist Sidney E Frank in commemoration of Turing:

Sculptor Stephen Kettler

Alan Turing was the inspirational mathematician at the heart of Bletchley Park’s codebreaking successes during World War Two. Before he died in January 2006, the late Mr Sidney E Frank, an American billionaire, commissioned the internationally renowned sculptor Mr Stephen Kettle to create a statue in memory of Alan Turing. Kettle’s pioneering work led to the world’s first stacked slate statue, which is permanently housed in the Science Museum in London. The one and a half ton, life-size statue of Alan Turing is made from approximately half a million individual pieces of five hundred million year old Welsh slate and bears a faultless resemblance to the great man.

Philanthropist, Mr Frank, was probably best known in the UK for his campaign to raise awareness of RJ Mitchell, the legendary chief designer at Supermarine whose greatest legacy was the Spitfire single-seat fighter aircraft. Like Alan Turing, Mitchell did not receive the public acclamation that historians and experts believe he deserved. In October 2005, Sidney Frank decided to champion Alan Turing’s memory and achievements, through a project initiated by the Bletchley Park Trust.

Gordon Welchman

Alan Turing arrived at Bletchley Park on September 1939 and soon was pursuing his idea of building a machine that would break the Enigma key. He became head of the small Naval Enigma team in Hut 8 and contributed greatly to the breaking, by December 1939, of German Naval Enigma. By August 1940, Turing, together with his friend and colleague, Gordon Welchman, had brought the idea of an Enigma codebreaking machine to fruition with the construction of the Turing-Welchman Bombe which speeded up the process of breaking into the daily Enigma keys.

Historians agree that the work of the codebreakers at Bletchley Park effectively helped to shorten the war by two years, saving countless lives. Although, Alan Turing received the OBE for his wartime achievements, he died tragically in 1954 at the age of only 41, having received no public recognition of the colossal contribution he made to the outcome of the war and the computer age that was to follow.

Alan Turing was an accomplished runner who achieved world-class Marathon standards. His best time of 2 hours, 46 minutes, 3 seconds, was only 11 minutes slower than the winner in the 1948 Olympic Games. In a 1948 cross-country race he finished ahead of Tom Richards who was to go on to win the silver medal in the Olympics the same year.

Mr Simon Greenish, Director of Bletchley Park Trust, heralded the statue as a fitting and timely tribute to Turing. He continued, “Alan Turing is universally recognised as the founding father of the modern computer and one of the pre-eminent unsung intellectual warriors of the twentieth century. With the help of the Sidney E Frank Foundation and the brilliance of sculptor, Stephen Kettle, Bletchley Park is now home to an exquisite and magnificent memorial to the genius of Turing.”

Apple Macintosh's Logo, designed by Rob Janoff

In 1952 at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the UK, Turing was convicted of having a sexual relationship with another man, to which he made no defence other than to say he saw nothing wrong in his actions. Turing was sentenced to a treatment that amounted to chemical castration. The conviction robbed him of his security clearance for GCHQ, for which he still worked, and made him the target for surveillance at the start of the cold war. He died after eating an apple laced with cyanide.

According to The Bletchley Park announcement, the symbol of the half-eaten apple lives on to this day with the logo of the Apple MacIntosh computer.

In 1977, it was Rob Janoff, then working for Regis McKenna as an art director, who was tasked to design the logo for Apple Computer, creating an apple with a bite out of it. Asked 25 June 2007 by Philosopedia how he had come up with the idea for Apple's logo, Janoff responded to Warren Allen Smith:

• I wish I had known about Alan Turing before I designed the logo because it's such a great story, but unfortunately, no it wasn't on my to-do list when I designed the apple logo. I've been asked this question before. I wasn't aware of Alan Turing until after the urban legend took off. Thanks for the link by the way. I enjoyed learning more about him. --Rob

A British Prime Minister's Apology

on 11 September 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized to Turing, telling reporters that Turing had been treated "terribly," that the outcome of World War II could have been quite different had it not been for Turing’s efforts in cracking German codes, notably the Enigma coding machine. Brown said,

• On behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work, I am very proud to say: We’re sorry. You deserved so much better.