June 30th! It has gone quickly and with today being the last day of pride month it seems fitting to mention a very influential scientist that has shaped modern life, contributed to the war effort and is now honoured by appearing in the £50 note in the UK: Alan Turing.
Back in the 1950s started exploring the idea of what it would mean for a machint to be intelligent. This may be a way of starting the stroy of what we call now Artificial Intelligence. Within his paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” the idea of the so-called Turing test is brought to life: If a machine is able to imitate intelligence such that a human is not able to distinguish the machine from a human, can we say that the machine is intelligent?
All this started for him much earlier… In 1936 in the paper entitles “Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” he proposed the idea of a universal computing machine, now called Turing machine, capable of simulating any computer algorithm. Computer Science got a boost with this as the idea underpings the developent of modern computers and indeed programming languages.
You may have come across Turings name in recent accounts of his work during the Second World War helping crack the codes created woth the Enigma machine used by the Germans. In doing so he is said to have changed the course of the war and shortening it by 2 years and saving millions of lives. All Turing’s wartime work led to him getting awarded an OBE in 1945.
Not all is fine with his story. He is also one of Britain’s most famous victims of Homophobia. Between 1885-1967 approximately 49,000 homosexual men were convicted of gross indecency under British law. After a year of government-mandated hormonal therapy, Alan Turing died on June 7th, 1954, at the age of 41. Postmortem examination showed that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. He used an apple to administer the poison. All this is has happened within living memory…
There is still a lot to be done to tackle discrimination of any kind, whether you are LGBTQ+, speak other language, or your skin is of a different colour. You can explore more about Turings life and contributions and I recommend the excellent book “Alan Turing: The Enigma” by Andrew Hodges.