September 10, 2012 • 19 mins
Alan Turing conceived of computers decades before anyone was building one. He also acted as a top-secret code breaker during World War II. Despite his accomplishments, he was prosecuted as a homosexual by the British government. Tune in to learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair Dowdy and I'm Deblina chuk Reboarding, and today
we're going to be talking about Alan Turing. And he's
considered the father of computer science, the father of artificial intelligence,
(00:25):
and also one of the most important wartime code breakers
in World War Two. So quite a resume just right
off the bat there, and for listeners with a more
literary bent, he's also been called the Shelley of Science,
which is a name I kind of took a shine
to you. Yeah, and others have too. He's been a
really popular podcast suggestion, though his resumes focus on math
(00:47):
and technology has always kind of scared us off a
little bit. I think, I mean things like number theory, probability,
computer programs. It's not our usual subject matter stuff. I'm
I'm honestly a little scared to get into too deeply.
But fortunately some of his work really transcends the arcane.
It's it's understandable if you put some effort into it.
(01:09):
And there's a wealth of biographical materials to which I
feel like the last few podcasts I've done that has
not been the case, so it was a little it
was a little refreshing really to research Alan Turning and
know that there's so much out there about this man.
There are m I T lectures, there's a digital archive
at Alan Turing dot net. Their article has in just
about every science journal you can name, and there's a
(01:32):
How Stuff Works podcast to Yeah, Jonathan and Chris talked
about Turing's life less fall on tech stuff and so
that's a great place to turn if you want to
a little more of an in depth discussion on programming. Yeah, specifically,
I was glad though that even they admitted that the
map was kind of tricky to discuss. It's just so
(01:52):
high level. But they do really do a good job
covering the programming and in that side of Turning story.
But it's also June, which is Pride Month, and that's
why we've picked Turing for today's topic. He's a great,
if tragic example of a remarkable man, really a genius
whose life was so clearly defined by his homosexuality and
(02:14):
reminded me a lot of Oscar Wilde, who Katie and
I covered last year for Pride Month. He was another
man who was really destroyed by prejudice at the absolute
height of his achievement. So it's a great story to
learn about, and it's it's good to know about Turing's achievements,
but it is also a really, really sad story. Yeah
(02:35):
it is. But before we get to that, we're going
to start sort of with the beginnings of his life.
Alan Mathieson Turing was born June nine, twelve in London
to a member of the Indian civil service. His father
actually served in the Madrass presidency and his mother's father
was the chief engineer of the Madrass railways. But Turning
didn't grow up in India. Instead, his parents had the
(02:56):
kids fostered in British homes, which, as you can imagine,
was pretty lonely, and his parents didn't even come back
to England until nine, not until his dad retired. So
he spent prep school trying to do as much science
and math as he could get away with, which at
the time it wasn't really the agenda. I guess he
would be an outstanding student these days, but his skepticism
(03:18):
and his curiosity also sometimes got him in trouble with
with the authority figures at school. But in nineteen twenty eight,
he had his first experience of true intellectual stimulation. He
made friends with a boy who was one year ahead
of him, Christopher Morecambe and Jonathan and Chris. The way
they explained this, I really liked it the way they
(03:40):
explained the friendship. Essentially, the two kids could bounce ideas
off of each other and combine what they knew and
really come away from it with a deeper understanding. So
sort of a friendship of two minds that was really
influential in the young Turing's life. Yeah, So when Marcum
died suddenly in nineteen third, the teenage Churing was left
(04:02):
wondering what happened to Markham's consciousness. He was pretty devastated
and and wanted to explore that idea further. So for
three years he wrote letters to Markham's mother trying to
figure out the relationship between mind and matter. And that's
a quest that would later define his work and artificial intelligence,
which you're going to talk about a little more in
a few minutes. Yea, I will definitely be talking about that.
But in October nine, so while he's really in the
(04:24):
middle of his grief in and this new look into
the relationship between mind and matter. He goes off to
college King's College, Cambridge, and of course he studies math,
and it was really a different inspiring environment for him
to one where he could think creatively. He could study
things like philosophy and economics and surround himself by intelligent people,
(04:48):
and also recognized his own sexuality, and he socialized with
some of the anti war intellectual circle. But his politics
weren't really sharply defined during this period. His in recreation
was athletic. He liked running and rowing and failing, and
of course doing math. Yeah, by nineteen thirty four he
had received a distinguished degree, and by nineteen thirty five,
(05:10):
at age twenty two, he got a fellowship to King's College.
So well on this intellectual path of his. But it
was in nineteen thirty five that Turing started tackling and
intriguing mathematical question, and that's the question of decidability. And
during that process he envisions a machine that could complete
computational operations just like the human brain. The Turing machine
(05:34):
at that point was purely theoretical, but it could perform
any kind of operation. It was programmed to do, play chess,
to calculate numbers, anything, like that, and that idea develops
into the idea of a universal Turing machine which could
handle any task, and individual touring machine could. So, for example,
if the Turing machine is the early computer program, the
(05:54):
universal machine would be the early computer, the one machine
that can do any task it's programmed to do. Yeah,
and a guy named b Jack Copeland described the significance
of this creation in an M I. T lecture. And
it really helped me understand how important it was because
it might seem a little old hat if you if
you just look at it like a computer or computer program,
(06:16):
he said. Nowadays, when nearly everyone owns the physical realization
of a universal turning machine, Turing's idea of a one
stop shop computing machine is apt to seem as obvious
as the wheel. But in nineteen thirty six, engineers thought
in terms of building specific machines for particular purposes. So
this was really a revolutionary idea at the time, and
(06:38):
of course some people realized that, but not everyone knew
the full implications of of what this idea would eventually
come to. Yeah, And it would be more than a
decade before the physical realization of a turning machine was
actually built, until then Touring continued continued his studies at
Princeton and then returned to England and Cambridge before the
outbreak of World War two, and then on the first
(07:00):
full day of the war he joined the Government Code
and Cipher School, whose headquarters were at the now famous
Fleshley Park in London. Yeah, and the GCCS was busy
bringing together all of the country's top minds at this point,
so mathematicians like Touring, that also chess players and egyptologists,
all sorts of smart people with different kinds of skills,
(07:20):
anyone who they hoped might lend insight into breaking German codes,
which was what they were all about in the chief
Code at the time. The one that was really giving
them the most trouble was the Enigma, and Polish Cryptanalysis
had been working on the Enigma for a really long
time since the nineteen thirty two and they had created
a code breaking machine called the Bomba a few years
(07:43):
after that, but by nineteen thirty nine, Touring and others
were helping to create a new machine, one that could
adapt to the Enigma, because it got to where the
Germans were changing the codes every twenty four hours pretty much,
so he helped develop a new machine called the Bomb,
which could decipher LOOFWAFA Enigma communications. There's a really neat
(08:04):
British Heritage article by Gene pash Key about Bletchley Park,
which I recommend if you just sort of want to
get a picture of it. We were actually talking about
this might be a good episode in itself, but I
hope we don't give too much away. It nicely describes
rooms full of these machines and the operators who maintain them.
And in case you think that they're little, tiny devices
(08:27):
like we're used to today, little electronic devices, they're not
in any sense like that. They are large mechanical machines
that required a lot of upbeat. They had to be
kept clean, um they were. They took up the room essentially,
So these really big machines. They helped crack the Air
Force Enigma, but the German naval Enigma was kind of
(08:49):
a tougher nut to crack and also critical for winning
the Battle of the Atlantic. So Turing had worked out
part of the code in nineteen thirty nine, but the
big break in the situation came courtesy of a Royal
Navy when they captured an Enigma machine and code book
from a U boat. So by June one U boat
traffic was decipherable. Yeah, they had cracked the code, and
(09:10):
by early nineteen forty two, Bletchley Park was decoding thirty
nine thousand German transmissions a month, and of course some
of those were complaints about the underwear splitting down the
middle and that type of thing, but also some really
serious communications in there. It rose to an eventual eighty
four thousand transmissions a month, so pretty astonishing figure. And
(09:34):
with the nineteen forty three breaking of Germany's high level
binary teleprinter code, which was what Hitler himself used, and
high members of his government um Churchill, was able to
read Hitler's mail before Hitler could read it. According to
Posh's article, something I thought was interesting and something I
never knew about Bletchley Park. Yeah, me neither. But it
(09:56):
turns out the combined efforts of Bletchley Park shortened the
war by two years, and for his part, Turing received
the Order of the British Empire, which was one of
the most prestigious awards you could get. Yeah. And so
after the war he's looking for a new job and
he was recruited to the National Physics Laboratory, and the task,
conveniently enough was to design and build an electronic computer,
(10:19):
so essentially a real Turing machine. Seems like just the
guy to bring in to do this, and he called
his new design the Automatic Computing Engine, which has the
lovely acronym ACE. Would have made a good computer, uh,
and it was a really ambitious advanced design it. If
it had been built, it would have had the memory
capacity of an early Mac. So that's pretty astounding if
(10:42):
you consider this immediately after a World War Two. Yeah,
but things moved more slowly than they had at Bletchley Park.
There was lots of red tape to deal with, and
Turing's colleagues thought that the original ACE design was too
much and opted for a smaller machine, which was called
the Pilot Model ACE. So part of the problem here
was that Turing's wartime achievements were unrecognized due to their secrecy. Yeah,
(11:06):
he couldn't go out and say, well, guys at Bletchley Park,
I did this. I mean, he couldn't talk about any
of that stuff. Yeah, he couldn't brag on himself. So
to relieve the frustration and the stress of the situation,
he started long distance running, and it took an injury
actually to prevent him from qualifying for the nine Olympic
marathon team. So he was pretty good at it. He
(11:27):
was really good at it. It's it's one of those
I don't know, it's like a cherry on top for
somebody with so many talents that they would also be
an amazing athlete. Well, I was going to say, it's
almost not fair, but you're kinder than I am, obviously. Yeah, well,
whatever way you look at it. But by this point,
delays meant that the National Physics Laboratory wasn't going to
be the first place that built the first working electronics
(11:50):
stored program digital computer. That honor went to Manchester University
and it happened in June. So Turing obviously frustrated by
his his time at the National Physics Laboratory, and they
got beat out. Yeah, they got beat out. He wasn't
really listened to his achievements, and accomplishments weren't really appreciated
(12:11):
to the the level they deserved to be. So he
went to work in Manchester, oddly enough as the deputy
director even though there was no director of the program.
Kind of a strange little detail there. Yeah, but he
designed the programming system of the Ferronti Mark one, the
first commercially available digital electronic computer, so hopefully that was
(12:33):
a little solace for a consolation program. Yeah. Um. And
it was also during his time at Manchester that Turing
started to hypothesize about what would later be known as
artificial intelligence, and and I thought it was it was interesting,
and this is something that's kind of, I guess, difficult
for me to talk about with my limited knowledge of
(12:53):
computer programming and science. I just work on a computer.
I don't know what happens inside. But I impressed that Um,
even though he had he had the skill to work
on developing this field, he put the machine to use
right away, so I'm sure he was still considering about
how it could be advanced. But he started looking for
(13:14):
ways to use the Fronti Mark one, which I thought
was was pretty neat. Yeah. It kind of went back
to his old interest in the connection between mind and matter,
and in nineteen fifty Touring wrote a paper called Computing,
Machinery and Intelligence in the journal Mind. In it, he
proposed something called an imitation test. Today that's called the
Turing test, and the test basically provided a way to
(13:37):
judge the intelligence of a machine without bias. So an interrogator,
for example, would sit in an isolated room from two subjects,
one a person, one a machine, and the interrogator would
ask them both questions, and if the interrogator couldn't tell
who was who, then that meant the machine was thinking. Yeah,
it had intelligence in some definable way. And Turing even
(14:01):
predicted he had a lot of confidence in computers. He
predicted that by the year two thousand, a computer would
be so good at this game this, this Turing test,
an interrogator would not have more than a seventy percent
chance of correctly identifying who is who after five minutes.
And that is a very ambitious goal because according to
(14:23):
Encyclopedia Britannica, no computer today has even come close to
that standard. But Turing really he did have a lot
of hopes for computers. Yeah. He also hypothesized that one day, quote,
ladies would take their computers for walks in the park
and tell each other, my little computer said such a
funny thing in the morning. I think we're a little
(14:43):
closer to that one than the seventy percent goal. Maybe
I don't know. I still like my doggie though. Yeah.
So Turing continued to study artificial intelligence, but also stuff
like biological growth with the FRONTI Mark one I said
that he really did put that sheen too good youth
and his career was expanding into these different subject areas
(15:04):
and his recognition was also growing. He was elected as
a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in March
nineteen fifty one. That's another really prestigious honor. He was
appointed to Readership in the Theory of Computing at Manchester,
which sounds like a very modern title. But in nineteen
fifty two things took a turn for the worse in
(15:24):
his life after a break in in his Manchester home
and he told the police that he thought the burglar
was probably connected to a man he was quote having
an affair with, and he had been pretty open about
his sexuality since college. During his Letchley Park days, he
had proposed to a colleague, Joan Clark, but broke it off.
(15:45):
He told her that he was gay and couldn't marry her.
But being so frank with the police in this way
was really dangerous because at the time homosexuality was a
felony in Great Britain. And so Turing was tried and
convicted of growth indecency, and he was faced with a
really terrible choice. Yeah. His two choices were prison or
(16:07):
hormone injections of estrogen, so chemical sterilization. Yeah, and he
chose the latter and also lost his security clearance as
a result, So no government codes, no government computers. And
on June seven, nineteen fifty four, he was found dead
by his housekeeper with a partially eaten cyanide laced apple
by his side. Now, some have theorized that he was
(16:30):
assassinated as a security risk, but it's pretty much widely
accepted nowadays that Turing committed suicide, and even then, right,
and it's also accepted that Turing did kill himself in
in this particular way so that it would allow his
mother to interpret the situation as an accident, since he'd
been working with cyanide and other chemicals in his work,
so she thought that he had some cyanide on his
(16:51):
hands and he ate an apple and accidentally poisoned himself.
But assuming he did commit suicide, which is what most
people have feeling, it's a really tragic end to to
this great life. And and at the heels of this
terrible prosecution. So in two thousand nine, Prime Minister Gordon
(17:11):
Brown issued a formal apology for the British Government's treatment
of Touring, and I'm going to read just part of it.
He said, Touring truly was one of those individuals we
can point to whose unique contribution it helped to turn
the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he has
owed makes it all the more horrifying. Therefore, that he
was treated so inhumanely on the behalf of the British
(17:33):
government and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work,
I'm very proud to say we're sorry. You deserve so
much better. So two thousand twelve is Alan Turing Year,
and a state side recognition has been long standing. The
US Association for Computer Machinery has given out the Touring
Awards since nineteen sixty six, and if anything, as technology
(17:54):
develops in new areas of steady emerge, Alan Turing will
probably just become more recognized as the years on. Yeah,
if you think about how many career descriptions that apply
to his name, you know, father of artificial intelligence, that
sort of thing that didn't exist when he was alive.
We can only imagine that more will be added over
the years as science and technology advances. Yeah, and we
(18:18):
have a lot of information about this kind of stuff
on our site, which we will tell you more about
at the end. But if you have anything to contribute
on this topic, you know anything else about Touring's research,
or maybe an anecdote about his life that we missed,
please write us at history podcast at how staff works
dot com. You can also look us up on Twitter
at missed in History or on Facebook. Again. We also
(18:38):
do have so many tech articles. You can find them
by visiting our website and just going right to the
tech cab and looking from there you'll find tons of
stuff that interests you if you are into computer science
or programming or math or anything like that. All of
it is on our website at www dot ho stuff
(19:00):
works dot com. Mm hmmmm. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, does it how stuff works dot com.
H m hm, m m mmmm.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair Dowdy and I'm Deblina chuk Reboarding, and today
we're going to be talking about Alan Turing. And he's
considered the father of computer science, the father of artificial intelligence,
(00:25):
and also one of the most important wartime code breakers
in World War Two. So quite a resume just right
off the bat there, and for listeners with a more
literary bent, he's also been called the Shelley of Science,
which is a name I kind of took a shine
to you. Yeah, and others have too. He's been a
really popular podcast suggestion, though his resumes focus on math
(00:47):
and technology has always kind of scared us off a
little bit. I think, I mean things like number theory, probability,
computer programs. It's not our usual subject matter stuff. I'm
I'm honestly a little scared to get into too deeply.
But fortunately some of his work really transcends the arcane.
It's it's understandable if you put some effort into it.
(01:09):
And there's a wealth of biographical materials to which I
feel like the last few podcasts I've done that has
not been the case, so it was a little it
was a little refreshing really to research Alan Turning and
know that there's so much out there about this man.
There are m I T lectures, there's a digital archive
at Alan Turing dot net. Their article has in just
about every science journal you can name, and there's a
(01:32):
How Stuff Works podcast to Yeah, Jonathan and Chris talked
about Turing's life less fall on tech stuff and so
that's a great place to turn if you want to
a little more of an in depth discussion on programming. Yeah, specifically,
I was glad though that even they admitted that the
map was kind of tricky to discuss. It's just so
(01:52):
high level. But they do really do a good job
covering the programming and in that side of Turning story.
But it's also June, which is Pride Month, and that's
why we've picked Turing for today's topic. He's a great,
if tragic example of a remarkable man, really a genius
whose life was so clearly defined by his homosexuality and
(02:14):
reminded me a lot of Oscar Wilde, who Katie and
I covered last year for Pride Month. He was another
man who was really destroyed by prejudice at the absolute
height of his achievement. So it's a great story to
learn about, and it's it's good to know about Turing's achievements,
but it is also a really, really sad story. Yeah
(02:35):
it is. But before we get to that, we're going
to start sort of with the beginnings of his life.
Alan Mathieson Turing was born June nine, twelve in London
to a member of the Indian civil service. His father
actually served in the Madrass presidency and his mother's father
was the chief engineer of the Madrass railways. But Turning
didn't grow up in India. Instead, his parents had the
(02:56):
kids fostered in British homes, which, as you can imagine,
was pretty lonely, and his parents didn't even come back
to England until nine, not until his dad retired. So
he spent prep school trying to do as much science
and math as he could get away with, which at
the time it wasn't really the agenda. I guess he
would be an outstanding student these days, but his skepticism
(03:18):
and his curiosity also sometimes got him in trouble with
with the authority figures at school. But in nineteen twenty eight,
he had his first experience of true intellectual stimulation. He
made friends with a boy who was one year ahead
of him, Christopher Morecambe and Jonathan and Chris. The way
they explained this, I really liked it the way they
(03:40):
explained the friendship. Essentially, the two kids could bounce ideas
off of each other and combine what they knew and
really come away from it with a deeper understanding. So
sort of a friendship of two minds that was really
influential in the young Turing's life. Yeah, So when Marcum
died suddenly in nineteen third, the teenage Churing was left
(04:02):
wondering what happened to Markham's consciousness. He was pretty devastated
and and wanted to explore that idea further. So for
three years he wrote letters to Markham's mother trying to
figure out the relationship between mind and matter. And that's
a quest that would later define his work and artificial intelligence,
which you're going to talk about a little more in
a few minutes. Yea, I will definitely be talking about that.
But in October nine, so while he's really in the
(04:24):
middle of his grief in and this new look into
the relationship between mind and matter. He goes off to
college King's College, Cambridge, and of course he studies math,
and it was really a different inspiring environment for him
to one where he could think creatively. He could study
things like philosophy and economics and surround himself by intelligent people,
(04:48):
and also recognized his own sexuality, and he socialized with
some of the anti war intellectual circle. But his politics
weren't really sharply defined during this period. His in recreation
was athletic. He liked running and rowing and failing, and
of course doing math. Yeah, by nineteen thirty four he
had received a distinguished degree, and by nineteen thirty five,
(05:10):
at age twenty two, he got a fellowship to King's College.
So well on this intellectual path of his. But it
was in nineteen thirty five that Turing started tackling and
intriguing mathematical question, and that's the question of decidability. And
during that process he envisions a machine that could complete
computational operations just like the human brain. The Turing machine
(05:34):
at that point was purely theoretical, but it could perform
any kind of operation. It was programmed to do, play chess,
to calculate numbers, anything, like that, and that idea develops
into the idea of a universal Turing machine which could
handle any task, and individual touring machine could. So, for example,
if the Turing machine is the early computer program, the
(05:54):
universal machine would be the early computer, the one machine
that can do any task it's programmed to do. Yeah,
and a guy named b Jack Copeland described the significance
of this creation in an M I. T lecture. And
it really helped me understand how important it was because
it might seem a little old hat if you if
you just look at it like a computer or computer program,
(06:16):
he said. Nowadays, when nearly everyone owns the physical realization
of a universal turning machine, Turing's idea of a one
stop shop computing machine is apt to seem as obvious
as the wheel. But in nineteen thirty six, engineers thought
in terms of building specific machines for particular purposes. So
this was really a revolutionary idea at the time, and
(06:38):
of course some people realized that, but not everyone knew
the full implications of of what this idea would eventually
come to. Yeah, And it would be more than a
decade before the physical realization of a turning machine was
actually built, until then Touring continued continued his studies at
Princeton and then returned to England and Cambridge before the
outbreak of World War two, and then on the first
(07:00):
full day of the war he joined the Government Code
and Cipher School, whose headquarters were at the now famous
Fleshley Park in London. Yeah, and the GCCS was busy
bringing together all of the country's top minds at this point,
so mathematicians like Touring, that also chess players and egyptologists,
all sorts of smart people with different kinds of skills,
(07:20):
anyone who they hoped might lend insight into breaking German codes,
which was what they were all about in the chief
Code at the time. The one that was really giving
them the most trouble was the Enigma, and Polish Cryptanalysis
had been working on the Enigma for a really long
time since the nineteen thirty two and they had created
a code breaking machine called the Bomba a few years
(07:43):
after that, but by nineteen thirty nine, Touring and others
were helping to create a new machine, one that could
adapt to the Enigma, because it got to where the
Germans were changing the codes every twenty four hours pretty much,
so he helped develop a new machine called the Bomb,
which could decipher LOOFWAFA Enigma communications. There's a really neat
(08:04):
British Heritage article by Gene pash Key about Bletchley Park,
which I recommend if you just sort of want to
get a picture of it. We were actually talking about
this might be a good episode in itself, but I
hope we don't give too much away. It nicely describes
rooms full of these machines and the operators who maintain them.
And in case you think that they're little, tiny devices
(08:27):
like we're used to today, little electronic devices, they're not
in any sense like that. They are large mechanical machines
that required a lot of upbeat. They had to be
kept clean, um they were. They took up the room essentially,
So these really big machines. They helped crack the Air
Force Enigma, but the German naval Enigma was kind of
(08:49):
a tougher nut to crack and also critical for winning
the Battle of the Atlantic. So Turing had worked out
part of the code in nineteen thirty nine, but the
big break in the situation came courtesy of a Royal
Navy when they captured an Enigma machine and code book
from a U boat. So by June one U boat
traffic was decipherable. Yeah, they had cracked the code, and
(09:10):
by early nineteen forty two, Bletchley Park was decoding thirty
nine thousand German transmissions a month, and of course some
of those were complaints about the underwear splitting down the
middle and that type of thing, but also some really
serious communications in there. It rose to an eventual eighty
four thousand transmissions a month, so pretty astonishing figure. And
(09:34):
with the nineteen forty three breaking of Germany's high level
binary teleprinter code, which was what Hitler himself used, and
high members of his government um Churchill, was able to
read Hitler's mail before Hitler could read it. According to
Posh's article, something I thought was interesting and something I
never knew about Bletchley Park. Yeah, me neither. But it
(09:56):
turns out the combined efforts of Bletchley Park shortened the
war by two years, and for his part, Turing received
the Order of the British Empire, which was one of
the most prestigious awards you could get. Yeah. And so
after the war he's looking for a new job and
he was recruited to the National Physics Laboratory, and the task,
conveniently enough was to design and build an electronic computer,
(10:19):
so essentially a real Turing machine. Seems like just the
guy to bring in to do this, and he called
his new design the Automatic Computing Engine, which has the
lovely acronym ACE. Would have made a good computer, uh,
and it was a really ambitious advanced design it. If
it had been built, it would have had the memory
capacity of an early Mac. So that's pretty astounding if
(10:42):
you consider this immediately after a World War Two. Yeah,
but things moved more slowly than they had at Bletchley Park.
There was lots of red tape to deal with, and
Turing's colleagues thought that the original ACE design was too
much and opted for a smaller machine, which was called
the Pilot Model ACE. So part of the problem here
was that Turing's wartime achievements were unrecognized due to their secrecy. Yeah,
(11:06):
he couldn't go out and say, well, guys at Bletchley Park,
I did this. I mean, he couldn't talk about any
of that stuff. Yeah, he couldn't brag on himself. So
to relieve the frustration and the stress of the situation,
he started long distance running, and it took an injury
actually to prevent him from qualifying for the nine Olympic
marathon team. So he was pretty good at it. He
(11:27):
was really good at it. It's it's one of those
I don't know, it's like a cherry on top for
somebody with so many talents that they would also be
an amazing athlete. Well, I was going to say, it's
almost not fair, but you're kinder than I am, obviously. Yeah, well,
whatever way you look at it. But by this point,
delays meant that the National Physics Laboratory wasn't going to
be the first place that built the first working electronics
(11:50):
stored program digital computer. That honor went to Manchester University
and it happened in June. So Turing obviously frustrated by
his his time at the National Physics Laboratory, and they
got beat out. Yeah, they got beat out. He wasn't
really listened to his achievements, and accomplishments weren't really appreciated
(12:11):
to the the level they deserved to be. So he
went to work in Manchester, oddly enough as the deputy
director even though there was no director of the program.
Kind of a strange little detail there. Yeah, but he
designed the programming system of the Ferronti Mark one, the
first commercially available digital electronic computer, so hopefully that was
(12:33):
a little solace for a consolation program. Yeah. Um. And
it was also during his time at Manchester that Turing
started to hypothesize about what would later be known as
artificial intelligence, and and I thought it was it was interesting,
and this is something that's kind of, I guess, difficult
for me to talk about with my limited knowledge of
(12:53):
computer programming and science. I just work on a computer.
I don't know what happens inside. But I impressed that Um,
even though he had he had the skill to work
on developing this field, he put the machine to use
right away, so I'm sure he was still considering about
how it could be advanced. But he started looking for
(13:14):
ways to use the Fronti Mark one, which I thought
was was pretty neat. Yeah. It kind of went back
to his old interest in the connection between mind and matter,
and in nineteen fifty Touring wrote a paper called Computing,
Machinery and Intelligence in the journal Mind. In it, he
proposed something called an imitation test. Today that's called the
Turing test, and the test basically provided a way to
(13:37):
judge the intelligence of a machine without bias. So an interrogator,
for example, would sit in an isolated room from two subjects,
one a person, one a machine, and the interrogator would
ask them both questions, and if the interrogator couldn't tell
who was who, then that meant the machine was thinking. Yeah,
it had intelligence in some definable way. And Turing even
(14:01):
predicted he had a lot of confidence in computers. He
predicted that by the year two thousand, a computer would
be so good at this game this, this Turing test,
an interrogator would not have more than a seventy percent
chance of correctly identifying who is who after five minutes.
And that is a very ambitious goal because according to
(14:23):
Encyclopedia Britannica, no computer today has even come close to
that standard. But Turing really he did have a lot
of hopes for computers. Yeah. He also hypothesized that one day, quote,
ladies would take their computers for walks in the park
and tell each other, my little computer said such a
funny thing in the morning. I think we're a little
(14:43):
closer to that one than the seventy percent goal. Maybe
I don't know. I still like my doggie though. Yeah.
So Turing continued to study artificial intelligence, but also stuff
like biological growth with the FRONTI Mark one I said
that he really did put that sheen too good youth
and his career was expanding into these different subject areas
(15:04):
and his recognition was also growing. He was elected as
a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in March
nineteen fifty one. That's another really prestigious honor. He was
appointed to Readership in the Theory of Computing at Manchester,
which sounds like a very modern title. But in nineteen
fifty two things took a turn for the worse in
(15:24):
his life after a break in in his Manchester home
and he told the police that he thought the burglar
was probably connected to a man he was quote having
an affair with, and he had been pretty open about
his sexuality since college. During his Letchley Park days, he
had proposed to a colleague, Joan Clark, but broke it off.
(15:45):
He told her that he was gay and couldn't marry her.
But being so frank with the police in this way
was really dangerous because at the time homosexuality was a
felony in Great Britain. And so Turing was tried and
convicted of growth indecency, and he was faced with a
really terrible choice. Yeah. His two choices were prison or
(16:07):
hormone injections of estrogen, so chemical sterilization. Yeah, and he
chose the latter and also lost his security clearance as
a result, So no government codes, no government computers. And
on June seven, nineteen fifty four, he was found dead
by his housekeeper with a partially eaten cyanide laced apple
by his side. Now, some have theorized that he was
(16:30):
assassinated as a security risk, but it's pretty much widely
accepted nowadays that Turing committed suicide, and even then, right,
and it's also accepted that Turing did kill himself in
in this particular way so that it would allow his
mother to interpret the situation as an accident, since he'd
been working with cyanide and other chemicals in his work,
so she thought that he had some cyanide on his
(16:51):
hands and he ate an apple and accidentally poisoned himself.
But assuming he did commit suicide, which is what most
people have feeling, it's a really tragic end to to
this great life. And and at the heels of this
terrible prosecution. So in two thousand nine, Prime Minister Gordon
(17:11):
Brown issued a formal apology for the British Government's treatment
of Touring, and I'm going to read just part of it.
He said, Touring truly was one of those individuals we
can point to whose unique contribution it helped to turn
the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he has
owed makes it all the more horrifying. Therefore, that he
was treated so inhumanely on the behalf of the British
(17:33):
government and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work,
I'm very proud to say we're sorry. You deserve so
much better. So two thousand twelve is Alan Turing Year,
and a state side recognition has been long standing. The
US Association for Computer Machinery has given out the Touring
Awards since nineteen sixty six, and if anything, as technology
(17:54):
develops in new areas of steady emerge, Alan Turing will
probably just become more recognized as the years on. Yeah,
if you think about how many career descriptions that apply
to his name, you know, father of artificial intelligence, that
sort of thing that didn't exist when he was alive.
We can only imagine that more will be added over
the years as science and technology advances. Yeah, and we
(18:18):
have a lot of information about this kind of stuff
on our site, which we will tell you more about
at the end. But if you have anything to contribute
on this topic, you know anything else about Touring's research,
or maybe an anecdote about his life that we missed,
please write us at history podcast at how staff works
dot com. You can also look us up on Twitter
at missed in History or on Facebook. Again. We also
(18:38):
do have so many tech articles. You can find them
by visiting our website and just going right to the
tech cab and looking from there you'll find tons of
stuff that interests you if you are into computer science
or programming or math or anything like that. All of
it is on our website at www dot ho stuff
(19:00):
works dot com. Mm hmmmm. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, does it how stuff works dot com.
H m hm, m m mmmm.
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