4/3/2019 15 Riveting Facts About Alan Turing | Mental Floss

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15 Riveting Facts About Alan Turing

BY SHAUNACY FERRO
JUNE 23, 2018

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W I K I M E D I A CO M M O N S // P U B L I C D O M A I N

More than six decades after his death Alan

Turing’s life remains a point of fascination—even for people who have no
interest in his groundbreaking work in computer science He has been the
subject of a play and an opera and referenced in multiple novels and numerous
musical albums The Benedict Cumberbatch film about his life
The Imitation Game received eight Oscar nominations But just who was he in
real life? Here are facts you should know about Alan Turing who was born on
this day in

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1. HE’S THE FATHER OF MODERN COMPUTER SCIENCE.

Turing essentially pioneered the idea of computer memory In Turing

published a seminal paper called “On Computable Numbers” PDF which
The Washington Post has called “the founding document of the computer age ” In
the philosophical article he hypothesized that one day we could build machines
that could compute any problem that a human could using s and s Turing
proposed single task machines called Turing machines that would be capable of
solving just one type of math problem but a “universal computer” would be able
to tackle any kind of problem thrown at it by storing instructional code in the
computer’s memory Turing’s ideas about memory storage and using a single
machine to carry out all tasks laid the foundation for what would become the
digital computer

In while working for the UK’s National Physical Laboratory he came up

with the Automatic Computing Machine the first digital computer with stored
programs Previous computers didn’t have electric memory storage and had to
be manually rewired to switch between different programs

2. HE PLAYED A HUGE ROLE IN WINNING WORLD WAR II.

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Turing began working at Bletchley Park Britain’s secret headquarters for its
codebreakers during World War II in By one estimate his work there may
have cut the war short by up to two years He’s credited with saving millions of
lives

Turing immediately got to work designing a codebreaking machine called the

Bombe an update of a previous Polish machine with the help of his colleague
Gordon Welchman The Bombe shortened the steps required in decoding and
of them were built for British use over the course of the war They allowed
codebreakers to decipher up to messages a day

His greatest achievement was cracking the Enigma a mechanical device used by
the German army to encode secure messages It proved nearly impossible to
decrypt without the correct cipher which the German forces changed every day
Turing worked to decipher German naval communications at a point when
German U boats were sinking ships carrying vital supplies across the Atlantic
between Allied nations In Turing and his team managed to decode the
German Enigma messages helping to steer Allied ships away from the German
submarine attacks In he traveled to the U S to help the Americans with
their own codebreaking work

3. HE BROKE THE RULES TO WRITE TO CHURCHILL.

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Early on Bletchley Park’s operations were hampered by a lack of resources but

pleas for better staffing were ignored by government officials So Alan Turing
and several other codebreakers at Bletchley Park went over their heads to write
directly to Prime Minister Winston Churchill One of the codebreakers from
Bletchley Park delivered the letter by hand in October

“Our reason for writing to you direct is that for months we have done everything
that we possibly can through the normal channels and that we despair of any
early improvement without your intervention ” they wrote to Churchill PDF
“No doubt in the long run these particular requirements will be met but
meanwhile still more precious months will have been wasted and as our needs
are continually expanding we see little hope of ever being adequately staffed ”

In response Churchill immediately fired off a missive to his chief of staff “Make
sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this had
been done ”

4. HE HAD SOME ODD HABITS.

Like many geniuses Turing was not without his eccentricities He wore a gas
mask while riding his bike to combat his allergies Instead of fixing his bike’s
faulty chain he learned exactly when to dismount to secure it in place before it
slipped off He was known around Bletchley Park for chaining his tea mug to a
di
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radiator to prevent it from being taken by other staffers

5. HE RODE HIS BIKE 60 MILES TO GET TO THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL.

Though he was considered an average student Turing was dedicated enough to

his schooling that when a general strike prevented him from taking the train to
his first day at his new elite boarding school the year old rode his bike the
miles instead

6. HE TRIED OUT FOR THE OLYMPICS.

Turing started running as a schoolboy and continued throughout his life

regularly running the miles between Cambridge and Ely while he was a fellow
at King’s College During World War II he occasionally ran the miles between
London and Bletchley Park for meetings

He almost became an Olympic athlete too He came in fifth place at a qualifying

marathon for the Olympics with a hour minute finish minutes
slower than the Olympic marathon winner However a leg injury held
back his athletic ambitions that year

Afterward he continued running for the Walton Athletic Club though and
served as its vice president ”I have such a stressful job that the only way I can
get it out of my mind is by running hard ” he once told the club’s secretary “It s
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the only way I can get some release

7. HE WAS PROSECUTED FOR BEING GAY.

In Turing was arrested after reporting a burglary in his home In the course
of the investigation the police discovered Turing’s relationship with another
man Arnold Murray Homosexual relationships were illegal in the UK at the
time and he was charged with “gross indecency ” He pled guilty on the advice of
his lawyer and opted to undergo chemical castration instead of serving time in
jail

8. THE GOVERNMENT ONLY RECENTLY APOLOGIZED FOR HIS CONVICTION …

In UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a public apology to Turing on

behalf of the British government “Alan and the many thousands of other gay
men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were
treated terribly ” Brown said This recognition of Alan s status as one of
Britain s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality
and long overdue Acknowledging Britain’s debt to Turing for his vital
contributions to the war effort he announced “on behalf of the British
government and all those who live freely thanks to Alan s work I am very proud
to say we re sorry you deserved so much better

His conviction was not actually pardoned though until when he received a
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4/3/2019
His conviction was not actually 15pardoned though until
Riveting Facts About Alan Turing | Mental Floss
when he received a
rare royal pardon from the Queen of England

9. … AND NAMED A LAW AFTER HIM.

Turing was only one of the many men who suffered after being prosecuted for
their homosexuality under th century British indecency laws Homosexuality
was decriminalized in the UK in but the previous convictions were never
overturned Turing’s Law which went into effect in posthumously
pardoned men who had been convicted for having consensual gay sex before the
repeal According to one of the activists who campaigned for the mass pardons
around of the gay men convicted under the outdated law are still
alive

10. HE POISONED HIMSELF … MAYBE.

There is still a bit of mystery surrounding Turing’s death at the age of Turing
died of cyanide poisoning in what is widely believed to have been a suicide
Turing’s life had been turned upside down by his arrest He lost his job and his
security clearance By order of the court he had to take hormones intended to
“cure” his homosexuality which caused him to grow breasts and made him
impotent But not everyone is convinced that he died by suicide

In Jack Copeland a Turing scholar argued that the evidence used to

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declare Turing’s death a suicide in would not be sufficient to close the case
today The half eaten apple by his bedside thought to be the source of his
poisoning was never tested for cyanide There was still a to do list on his desk
and his friends told the coroner at the time that he had seemed in good spirits
Turing’s mother in fact maintained that he probably accidentally poisoned
himself while experimenting with the chemical in his home laboratory He was
known to taste chemicals while identifying them and could be careless with
safety precautions

That line of inquiry is far more tame than some others including
one author’s theory that he was murdered by the FBI to cover up information
that would have been damaging to the U S

11. HIS FULL GENIUS WASN’T KNOWN IN HIS LIFETIME.

Alan Turing was a well respected mathematician in his time but his
contemporaries didn’t know the full extent of his contributions to the world
Turing’s work breaking the Enigma machine remained classified long after his
death meaning that his contributions to the war effort and to mathematics were
only partially known to the public during his lifetime It wasn’t until the s
that his instrumental role in the Allies World War II victory became public with
the declassification of the Enigma story The actual techniques Turing used to
decrypt the messages weren’t declassified until when two of his papers
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from Bletchley Park were released to the British National Archives

12. THE TURING TEST IS STILL USED TO MEASURE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE …

Can a machine fool a human into thinking they are chatting with another person?
That’s the crux of the Turing test an idea developed by Turing in regarding
how to measure artificial intelligence Turing argued in his paper “Computing
Machinery and Intelligence” PDF that the idea of machines “thinking” is not a
useful way to evaluate artificial intelligence Instead Turing suggests “the
imitation game ” a way to assess how successfully a machine can imitate human
behavior The best measure of artificial intelligence then is whether or not a
computer can convince a person that it is human

13. … BUT SOME CONSIDER IT TO BE AN OUTDATED IDEA.

As technology has progressed some feel the Turing test is no longer a useful way
to measure artificial intelligence It’s cool to think about computers being able to
talk just like a person but new technology is opening up avenues for computers
to express intelligence in other more useful ways A robot’s intelligence isn’t
necessarily defined by whether it can fake being human—self driving cars or
programs that can mimic sounds based on images might not pass the Turing test
but they certainly have intelligence

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14. HE CREATED THE FIRST COMPUTER CHESS PROGRAM.

Inspired by the chess champions he worked with at Bletchley Park Alan Turing
created an algorithm for an early version of computer chess—although at that
time there was no computer to try it out on Created with paper and pencil the
Turochamp program was designed to think two moves ahead picking out the
best moves possible In Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov played
against Turing’s algorithm beating it in moves “I would compare it to an
early car—you might laugh at them but it is still an incredible achievement
Kasparov said in a statement after the match up

15. THERE IS ALAN TURING MONOPOLY.

In Monopoly came out with an Alan Turing edition to celebrate the

centennial of his birth Turing had enjoyed playing Monopoly during his life and
the Turing themed Monopoly edition was designed based on a hand drawn board
created in by his friend William Newman Instead of hotels and houses it
featured huts and blocks inspired by Bletchley Park and included never before
published photos of Turing It’s hard to find but there are still a few copies of
the game on Amazon

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