June 22, 2011 • 20 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 how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm far A Dowdy and I'm Deblina chokoate boarding, and
today we're going to be talking about Alan Turing. And
he's considered the father of computer science, the father of
(00:23):
artificial intelligence, 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
(00:46):
on math and technology has always kind of scared us
off a little bit. I think, I mean things like
number theory, probability, computer programs, stung 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 articles in just about
every science journal you can name, and there's a house
(01:32):
Stuff Works podcast. Yeah, Jonathan and Chris talked about Turin'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
math 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. Yeah, 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
(03:17):
skepticism 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 more Cum and Jonathan and Chris.
The way they explained this, I really liked it the
(03:39):
way they 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
(04:01):
left 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. Yeah, I will definitely be
talking about that. But in October nine, so well, he's
(04:24):
really in the 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
(04:46):
himself by intelligent people, 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
(05:07):
thirty four he had received a distinguished degree, and by
nineteen thirty five, 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
(05:28):
machine that could complete computational operations just like the human brain.
The Turing machine at that point was purely theoretical, but
it could perform any kind of operation that was programmed
to do play chess, 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,
(05:51):
for example, if the Turing machine is the early computer program,
the universal machine would be the early computer. The one
machine that can do any task is 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
(06:13):
you just look at it like a computer or computer program,
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
(06:35):
this was really a revolutionary idea at the time, and
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 continuing continued his studies at
Princeton and then returned to England and Cambridge before the
(06:57):
outbreak of World War two, and then on the first
full day of the war he joined the Government Code
and Cipher School, whose headquarters were at the now famous
Bletchley Park in London. Yeah, and the g CCS was
busy bringing together all of the country's top minds at
this point, so mathematicians like Touring, but also chess players
and egyptologists, all sorts of smart people with different kinds
(07:20):
of skills, 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 nineteen thirty two, and they
had created a code breaking machine called the Bomba a
(07:43):
few years 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 DECIPHERLOFBAFA Enigma communications. There's a
(08:04):
really neat British Heritage article by Gene Paskey 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 upkeep. 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 have 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 is in 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.
(09:33):
And 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, I mean neither. But
(09:56):
it 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
(10:17):
electronic computer, 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. But it 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
(10:38):
capacity of an early MAX So that's pretty astounding if
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
(11:01):
was that Turing's wartime achievements were unrecognized due to their secrecy. Yeah,
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
(11:21):
actually to prevent him from qualifying for the ninety eight
Olympic marathon team. So he was pretty good at it.
It's 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,
(11:42):
delays meant that the National Physics Laboratory wasn't going to
be the first place that built the first working electronics
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
(12:03):
got beat out. Yeah, they got beat out. He wasn't
really listened to his achievements, and accomplishments weren't really appreciated
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
(12:27):
the programming system of the Ferronti Mark one, the first
commercially available digital electronic computer, so hopefully that was a
little solace for him. 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
(12:48):
this is something that's kind of, I guess, difficult for
me to talk about with my limited knowledge of computer
programming and science. I just work on a computer. I
don't know what happens inside. But I was impressed that, Um,
even though he had he had the skill to work
on developing this field, he put the machine to use
(13:09):
right away. So I'm sure he was still considering about
how it could be advanced. But he started looking for
ways to use the Ferronti 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
(13:30):
proposed something called an imitation test. Today that's called the
Turing test, and the test basically provided a way to
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
(13:52):
who was who, then that meant the machine was thinking. Yeah,
it had intelligence in some definable way. And Turing even
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
(14:15):
chance of correctly identifying who is who after five minutes.
And that is a very ambitious goal because according to
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,
(14:36):
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
closer to that one than the seventy percent goal. Maybe
I don't know. I still like my doggy though. Yeah.
So Turing continued to study artificial intelligence, but also stuff
like biological growth with the FRONTI Mark one I said
(14:58):
that he really did put that sheen too good youth,
and his career was expanding into these different subject areas
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,
(15:18):
which sounds like a very modern title. But in nineteen
fifty two things took a turn for the worse in
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 Bletchley Park days, he
(15:41):
had proposed to a colleague, Joan Clark, but broke it off.
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
(16:03):
really terrible choice. Yeah. His two choices were prison or
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
(16:23):
by his housekeeper with a partially eaten cyanide laced apple
by his side. Now, some have theorized that he was
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
(16:46):
been working with cyanide and other chemicals in his work,
so she thought that he had some cyanide on his
hand and he ate an apple and accidentally poisoned himself.
But assuming he did commit suicide, which is what most
people have feel, it's a really tragic end to to
this great life. And and at the heels of this
(17:07):
terrible prosecution. So in two thousand nine, Prime Minister Gordon
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 dead of gratitude he has
(17:27):
owed makes it all the more horrifying. Therefore, that he
was treated so inhumanely on the behalf of the British
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 stateside recognition has been long standing. The US
Association for Computer Machinery has given out the Touring Award
(17:50):
since nineteen sixty six, and if anything, as technology develops
in new areas of steady emerge, Alan Turing will probably
just become more recognized as the year's go 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.
(18:11):
We can only imagine that more will be added over
the years as science and technology advances. And we 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 Turion's research, or
maybe an anecdote about his life that we missed, please
(18:31):
write us at History Podcast at how staff works dot com.
You can also look us up on Twitter at mist
in history or on Facebook. And before we wrap up,
we thought it would be a good time to do
a little listener mail that has to do also with
a Battle of the Atlantic. We have a letter here
from Kate and she says, I just finished listening to
(18:53):
the sync the Bismarck podcast and wanted to share my
own tidbit from the story of the German battleship. Following
the battle, the h MS Cossack recovered floating on a
board a black and white cat from the Bismarck, renamed
Oscar and later unsinkable Sam. The cat went on to
serve on three Royal British Navy ships, surviving two more shipwrecks.
(19:13):
He was then retired from active duty and lived in
officers quarters in Gibraltar before being shipped to England, where
he lived the rest of his days. And she gives
us a link to a Wikipedia article that has a
portrait of Sam here. So thanks for that, Kate. That's
a very interesting tidbit. I looked at the picture. He's
the super cute cat. We always love pet stories here
at History that podcast. Yes, we're then us your pet stories,
(19:39):
especially they're historical because then they can turn into podcasts
every now and then, So send us your email at
History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. And again,
we also do have so many tech articles. You can
find them by visiting our website and just going right
to the tech tab and looking from there you'll find
tons of stuff that interest you if you are in
(20:00):
to computer science or programming, or math or or anything
like that. All of it is on our website at
www dot how staff works dot com. Be sure to
check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how staff Work staff as we explore the most
(20:20):
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House Stuff Works
iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm far A Dowdy and I'm Deblina chokoate boarding, and
today we're going to be talking about Alan Turing. And
he's considered the father of computer science, the father of
(00:23):
artificial intelligence, 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
(00:46):
on math and technology has always kind of scared us
off a little bit. I think, I mean things like
number theory, probability, computer programs, stung 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 articles in just about
every science journal you can name, and there's a house
(01:32):
Stuff Works podcast. Yeah, Jonathan and Chris talked about Turin'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
math 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. Yeah, 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
(03:17):
skepticism 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 more Cum and Jonathan and Chris.
The way they explained this, I really liked it the
(03:39):
way they 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
(04:01):
left 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. Yeah, I will definitely be
talking about that. But in October nine, so well, he's
(04:24):
really in the 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
(04:46):
himself by intelligent people, 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
(05:07):
thirty four he had received a distinguished degree, and by
nineteen thirty five, 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
(05:28):
machine that could complete computational operations just like the human brain.
The Turing machine at that point was purely theoretical, but
it could perform any kind of operation that was programmed
to do play chess, 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,
(05:51):
for example, if the Turing machine is the early computer program,
the universal machine would be the early computer. The one
machine that can do any task is 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
(06:13):
you just look at it like a computer or computer program,
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
(06:35):
this was really a revolutionary idea at the time, and
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 continuing continued his studies at
Princeton and then returned to England and Cambridge before the
(06:57):
outbreak of World War two, and then on the first
full day of the war he joined the Government Code
and Cipher School, whose headquarters were at the now famous
Bletchley Park in London. Yeah, and the g CCS was
busy bringing together all of the country's top minds at
this point, so mathematicians like Touring, but also chess players
and egyptologists, all sorts of smart people with different kinds
(07:20):
of skills, 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 nineteen thirty two, and they
had created a code breaking machine called the Bomba a
(07:43):
few years 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 DECIPHERLOFBAFA Enigma communications. There's a
(08:04):
really neat British Heritage article by Gene Paskey 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 upkeep. 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 have 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 is in 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.
(09:33):
And 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, I mean neither. But
(09:56):
it 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
(10:17):
electronic computer, 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. But it 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
(10:38):
capacity of an early MAX So that's pretty astounding if
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
(11:01):
was that Turing's wartime achievements were unrecognized due to their secrecy. Yeah,
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
(11:21):
actually to prevent him from qualifying for the ninety eight
Olympic marathon team. So he was pretty good at it.
It's 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,
(11:42):
delays meant that the National Physics Laboratory wasn't going to
be the first place that built the first working electronics
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
(12:03):
got beat out. Yeah, they got beat out. He wasn't
really listened to his achievements, and accomplishments weren't really appreciated
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
(12:27):
the programming system of the Ferronti Mark one, the first
commercially available digital electronic computer, so hopefully that was a
little solace for him. 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
(12:48):
this is something that's kind of, I guess, difficult for
me to talk about with my limited knowledge of computer
programming and science. I just work on a computer. I
don't know what happens inside. But I was impressed that, Um,
even though he had he had the skill to work
on developing this field, he put the machine to use
(13:09):
right away. So I'm sure he was still considering about
how it could be advanced. But he started looking for
ways to use the Ferronti 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
(13:30):
proposed something called an imitation test. Today that's called the
Turing test, and the test basically provided a way to
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
(13:52):
who was who, then that meant the machine was thinking. Yeah,
it had intelligence in some definable way. And Turing even
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
(14:15):
chance of correctly identifying who is who after five minutes.
And that is a very ambitious goal because according to
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,
(14:36):
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
closer to that one than the seventy percent goal. Maybe
I don't know. I still like my doggy though. Yeah.
So Turing continued to study artificial intelligence, but also stuff
like biological growth with the FRONTI Mark one I said
(14:58):
that he really did put that sheen too good youth,
and his career was expanding into these different subject areas
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,
(15:18):
which sounds like a very modern title. But in nineteen
fifty two things took a turn for the worse in
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 Bletchley Park days, he
(15:41):
had proposed to a colleague, Joan Clark, but broke it off.
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
(16:03):
really terrible choice. Yeah. His two choices were prison or
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
(16:23):
by his housekeeper with a partially eaten cyanide laced apple
by his side. Now, some have theorized that he was
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
(16:46):
been working with cyanide and other chemicals in his work,
so she thought that he had some cyanide on his
hand and he ate an apple and accidentally poisoned himself.
But assuming he did commit suicide, which is what most
people have feel, it's a really tragic end to to
this great life. And and at the heels of this
(17:07):
terrible prosecution. So in two thousand nine, Prime Minister Gordon
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 dead of gratitude he has
(17:27):
owed makes it all the more horrifying. Therefore, that he
was treated so inhumanely on the behalf of the British
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 stateside recognition has been long standing. The US
Association for Computer Machinery has given out the Touring Award
(17:50):
since nineteen sixty six, and if anything, as technology develops
in new areas of steady emerge, Alan Turing will probably
just become more recognized as the year's go 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.
(18:11):
We can only imagine that more will be added over
the years as science and technology advances. And we 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 Turion's research, or
maybe an anecdote about his life that we missed, please
(18:31):
write us at History Podcast at how staff works dot com.
You can also look us up on Twitter at mist
in history or on Facebook. And before we wrap up,
we thought it would be a good time to do
a little listener mail that has to do also with
a Battle of the Atlantic. We have a letter here
from Kate and she says, I just finished listening to
(18:53):
the sync the Bismarck podcast and wanted to share my
own tidbit from the story of the German battleship. Following
the battle, the h MS Cossack recovered floating on a
board a black and white cat from the Bismarck, renamed
Oscar and later unsinkable Sam. The cat went on to
serve on three Royal British Navy ships, surviving two more shipwrecks.
(19:13):
He was then retired from active duty and lived in
officers quarters in Gibraltar before being shipped to England, where
he lived the rest of his days. And she gives
us a link to a Wikipedia article that has a
portrait of Sam here. So thanks for that, Kate. That's
a very interesting tidbit. I looked at the picture. He's
the super cute cat. We always love pet stories here
at History that podcast. Yes, we're then us your pet stories,
(19:39):
especially they're historical because then they can turn into podcasts
every now and then, So send us your email at
History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. And again,
we also do have so many tech articles. You can
find them by visiting our website and just going right
to the tech tab and looking from there you'll find
tons of stuff that interest you if you are in
(20:00):
to computer science or programming, or math or or anything
like that. All of it is on our website at
www dot how staff works dot com. Be sure to
check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how staff Work staff as we explore the most
(20:20):
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House Stuff Works
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