June 16, 2018 • 20 mins
This is a revisit of a Sarah and Deblina episode on Alan Turing, who 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.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey listeners, Happy Saturday. Today we are sharing our twelve
podcast on Alan Touring, and this one comes from past
hosts Sarah and Bablina. We also have an update to
this episode and twenty third team. Alan Turing was granted
a royal pardon for his nineteen fifty two conviction for
gross indecency. That pardon came into effect on December, and
(00:24):
while this posthumous pardon was generally praised, it was also
criticized because thousands of other men had faced similar convictions,
but when Alan Touring was pardoned, they were not. However,
a law nicknamed the Alan Touring Law received royal assent
in ten and that paved the way to pardon men,
primarily gay and bisexual men, who had been convicted of
(00:47):
these types of crimes under laws that have since been abolished,
and a mass pardon followed in January of it did
include other previous podcast subject Oscar Wilde. At that point,
about fifteen thousand of the sixty five thousand men who
had been convicted under these now repealed laws, we're actually
(01:07):
still living. So listening for Alan Touring. Welcome to Stuff
you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm
Deblina Choker Boarding and today we're going to be talking
(01:29):
about Alan Turing. And he's considered the father of computer science,
the father of 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
(01:51):
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 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
(02:15):
work really transcends the arcane. It's it's understandable if you
put some effort into it, 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. It
was a little it was a little refreshing really to
research Alan Turing and know that there's so much out
there about this man. There are m I T lectures,
(02:36):
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 Stuff Works podcast too. Yeah, Jonathan
and Chris talked about Tern's life lass 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
(02:59):
even they amitted that the math was kind of tricky
to discuss. It's just so 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
(03:20):
remarkable man, really a genius whose life was so clearly
defined by his homosexuality and reminded me a lot of
Oscar Wilde, who Katie and I covered last year for
Pride Months. He was another man who was really destroyed
by prejudice at the absolute height of his achievements. So
it's a great story to learn about and it's it's
(03:42):
good to know about Turing's achievements, but it is also
a really, really sad story. Yeah it is. But before
we get to that, we're going to start sort of
with the beginnings of his life. Alan Mathison Turing was
born June 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
(04:03):
the Madrass Railways, but Turning didn't grow up in India. Instead,
his parents had the kids fostered in British homes, which,
as you can imagine, was pretty lonely, and his parents
didn't even come back to England until ninety, 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.
(04:26):
I guess he would be an outstanding student these days,
but his 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 morecam and Jonathan
(04:49):
and Chris. The way they explained this, I really liked
it the 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 Churing's life. Yeah.
(05:09):
So when Morcomb died suddenly in nineteen thirty teenage Churning
was 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 Morkholm'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
(05:30):
little more in a few minutes. Yeah, I will definitely
be talking about that. But in October nineteen thirty one,
so while he's really in the middle of his grief
and 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
(05:53):
could think creatively. He could study things like philosophy and
economics and surround himself by intel 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 main recreation was athletic. He
(06:13):
liked running and rowing and sailing, and of course doing math. Yeah,
by nineteen 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
(06:35):
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 at that point was
purely theoretical, but it could perform any kind of operation
it was programmed to do. Play chess, calculate numbers, anything
like that. And that idea develops into the idea of
(06:57):
a universal Turing machine, which could hand any task, and
individual Touring machine could. So 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 as programmed to do. Yeah, and a guy
named b. Jack Copeland described the significance of this creation
(07:17):
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, he said. Nowadays,
when nearly everyone owns the physical realization of a universal
Turing machine, Turing's idea of a one stop shop computing
machine is apt to seem as obvious as the wheel.
(07:40):
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 of course some
people realize 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
(08:01):
physical realization of a touring 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 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
(08:22):
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, 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
(08:43):
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 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
(09:04):
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 loofafa Enigma communications.
There's a 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,
(09:27):
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 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
(09:48):
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 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,
(10:09):
but the big break in the situation came courtesy of
the 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 by early nineteen forty two, Bletchley Park was decoding
thirty nine thousand German transmissions a month, and of course
(10:29):
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 with the nineteen forty three breaking of Germany's high
level binary teleprinter code, which was what Hitler himself used,
(10:53):
and high members of his government um Churchill, was able
to read Hitler's mail before or 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 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
(11:17):
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
(11:37):
an 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 capacity of an early MAX. So that's
(12:00):
pretty astounding if he 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
(12:24):
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 actually to prevent him from qualifying
for the nine Olympic Marathon team. So he was pretty
(12:46):
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, delays meant that the National Physics
Laboratory wasn't going to be the first place that built
(13:08):
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 got beat out. Yeah, they got
beat out. He wasn't really listened to his achievements and
(13:29):
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 the programming system of the Ferronti Mark one,
(13:49):
the first commercially available digital electronic computer. So hopefully that
was a little solace for him. Consolation programs. 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,
(14:09):
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 right away, so I'm sure he was still
(14:30):
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 proposed something called an imitation test. Today
(14:52):
that's called the Turing test, and the test basically provided
a way to judge the intelligence of a machine without
bio us 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
(15:13):
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 uh Turing test, an interrogator
would not have more than a seventy percent chance of
(15:35):
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,
(15:55):
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 goal. Maybe I
don't know. I still like my doggy though. Yeah. So
Turn continued to study artificial intelligence, but also stuff like
biological growth with the FRONTI Mark one I said that
(16:17):
he really did put that machine to good use, 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, which
(16:38):
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 Letchley Park days, he had
(17:01):
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 gross indecency and he was faced with a
(17:23):
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, ninety four, he was found dead by
(17:43):
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 this
particular way, so that it would allow his mother to
(18:03):
interpret the situation as an accident, since he'd been working
with cyanide and other chemicals in his work. Yea, so
she thought that he had some cyanide on his hands
and he ate an apple and accidentally poisoned himself. But uh,
assuming he did commit suicide, which is what most people assume,
it's a really tragic end to to this great life
(18:25):
and and at the heels of this 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,
(18:46):
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's 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.
(19:07):
So two thousand twelve is Alan Turing Year, and a
state side recognition has been longstanding. The US Association for
Computer Machinery has given out the Touring Awards 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 years go on. Yeah, if you
(19:28):
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. Thank you so much for joining
(19:52):
us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of
the archive, if you heard an email address or a
Facebook U r L or something similar are during the
course of the show, that may be obsolete now, so
here's our current contact information. We are at history Podcasts
at how stuff works dot com, and then we're at
missed in the History. All over social media that is
(20:12):
our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks
again for listening. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Hey listeners, Happy Saturday. Today we are sharing our twelve
podcast on Alan Touring, and this one comes from past
hosts Sarah and Bablina. We also have an update to
this episode and twenty third team. Alan Turing was granted
a royal pardon for his nineteen fifty two conviction for
gross indecency. That pardon came into effect on December, and
(00:24):
while this posthumous pardon was generally praised, it was also
criticized because thousands of other men had faced similar convictions,
but when Alan Touring was pardoned, they were not. However,
a law nicknamed the Alan Touring Law received royal assent
in ten and that paved the way to pardon men,
primarily gay and bisexual men, who had been convicted of
(00:47):
these types of crimes under laws that have since been abolished,
and a mass pardon followed in January of it did
include other previous podcast subject Oscar Wilde. At that point,
about fifteen thousand of the sixty five thousand men who
had been convicted under these now repealed laws, we're actually
(01:07):
still living. So listening for Alan Touring. Welcome to Stuff
you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm
Deblina Choker Boarding and today we're going to be talking
(01:29):
about Alan Turing. And he's considered the father of computer science,
the father of 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
(01:51):
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 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
(02:15):
work really transcends the arcane. It's it's understandable if you
put some effort into it, 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. It
was a little it was a little refreshing really to
research Alan Turing and know that there's so much out
there about this man. There are m I T lectures,
(02:36):
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 Stuff Works podcast too. Yeah, Jonathan
and Chris talked about Tern's life lass 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
(02:59):
even they amitted that the math was kind of tricky
to discuss. It's just so 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
(03:20):
remarkable man, really a genius whose life was so clearly
defined by his homosexuality and reminded me a lot of
Oscar Wilde, who Katie and I covered last year for
Pride Months. He was another man who was really destroyed
by prejudice at the absolute height of his achievements. So
it's a great story to learn about and it's it's
(03:42):
good to know about Turing's achievements, but it is also
a really, really sad story. Yeah it is. But before
we get to that, we're going to start sort of
with the beginnings of his life. Alan Mathison Turing was
born June 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
(04:03):
the Madrass Railways, but Turning didn't grow up in India. Instead,
his parents had the kids fostered in British homes, which,
as you can imagine, was pretty lonely, and his parents
didn't even come back to England until ninety, 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.
(04:26):
I guess he would be an outstanding student these days,
but his 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 morecam and Jonathan
(04:49):
and Chris. The way they explained this, I really liked
it the 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 Churing's life. Yeah.
(05:09):
So when Morcomb died suddenly in nineteen thirty teenage Churning
was 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 Morkholm'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
(05:30):
little more in a few minutes. Yeah, I will definitely
be talking about that. But in October nineteen thirty one,
so while he's really in the middle of his grief
and 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
(05:53):
could think creatively. He could study things like philosophy and
economics and surround himself by intel 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 main recreation was athletic. He
(06:13):
liked running and rowing and sailing, and of course doing math. Yeah,
by nineteen 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
(06:35):
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 at that point was
purely theoretical, but it could perform any kind of operation
it was programmed to do. Play chess, calculate numbers, anything
like that. And that idea develops into the idea of
(06:57):
a universal Turing machine, which could hand any task, and
individual Touring machine could. So 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 as programmed to do. Yeah, and a guy
named b. Jack Copeland described the significance of this creation
(07:17):
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, he said. Nowadays,
when nearly everyone owns the physical realization of a universal
Turing machine, Turing's idea of a one stop shop computing
machine is apt to seem as obvious as the wheel.
(07:40):
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 of course some
people realize 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
(08:01):
physical realization of a touring 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 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
(08:22):
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, 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
(08:43):
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 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
(09:04):
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 loofafa Enigma communications.
There's a 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,
(09:27):
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 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
(09:48):
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 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,
(10:09):
but the big break in the situation came courtesy of
the 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 by early nineteen forty two, Bletchley Park was decoding
thirty nine thousand German transmissions a month, and of course
(10:29):
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 with the nineteen forty three breaking of Germany's high
level binary teleprinter code, which was what Hitler himself used,
(10:53):
and high members of his government um Churchill, was able
to read Hitler's mail before or 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 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
(11:17):
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
(11:37):
an 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 capacity of an early MAX. So that's
(12:00):
pretty astounding if he 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
(12:24):
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 actually to prevent him from qualifying
for the nine Olympic Marathon team. So he was pretty
(12:46):
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, delays meant that the National Physics
Laboratory wasn't going to be the first place that built
(13:08):
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 got beat out. Yeah, they got
beat out. He wasn't really listened to his achievements and
(13:29):
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 the programming system of the Ferronti Mark one,
(13:49):
the first commercially available digital electronic computer. So hopefully that
was a little solace for him. Consolation programs. 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,
(14:09):
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 right away, so I'm sure he was still
(14:30):
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 proposed something called an imitation test. Today
(14:52):
that's called the Turing test, and the test basically provided
a way to judge the intelligence of a machine without
bio us 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
(15:13):
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 uh Turing test, an interrogator
would not have more than a seventy percent chance of
(15:35):
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,
(15:55):
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 goal. Maybe I
don't know. I still like my doggy though. Yeah. So
Turn continued to study artificial intelligence, but also stuff like
biological growth with the FRONTI Mark one I said that
(16:17):
he really did put that machine to good use, 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, which
(16:38):
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 Letchley Park days, he had
(17:01):
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 gross indecency and he was faced with a
(17:23):
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, ninety four, he was found dead by
(17:43):
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 this
particular way, so that it would allow his mother to
(18:03):
interpret the situation as an accident, since he'd been working
with cyanide and other chemicals in his work. Yea, so
she thought that he had some cyanide on his hands
and he ate an apple and accidentally poisoned himself. But uh,
assuming he did commit suicide, which is what most people assume,
it's a really tragic end to to this great life
(18:25):
and and at the heels of this 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,
(18:46):
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's 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.
(19:07):
So two thousand twelve is Alan Turing Year, and a
state side recognition has been longstanding. The US Association for
Computer Machinery has given out the Touring Awards 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 years go on. Yeah, if you
(19:28):
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. Thank you so much for joining
(19:52):
us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of
the archive, if you heard an email address or a
Facebook U r L or something similar are during the
course of the show, that may be obsolete now, so
here's our current contact information. We are at history Podcasts
at how stuff works dot com, and then we're at
missed in the History. All over social media that is
(20:12):
our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks
again for listening. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
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