Alan Turing

On the trip home, I ended up watching a movie based on the life of Alan Turing.  I'd heard the name but didn't really know much about him but by the end of the movie I knew quite a bit.   The movie was based on a book about his life and it intertwined three time lines of his life.  It alternated between his early life at school when his best and only friend introduced him to codes, his years during the war, and his life at the point when he was accused of the crime of being a homosexual. 

The most interesting part of the movie and the part which took up most of the film was that of his involvement at Bletchley Park in trying to break the code associated with the Enigma machine.  The code for the Enigma machine was changed every 24 hours at midnight and the code breakers had only one day to figure out the code but Alan decided he could build a machine that could decode the messages each day beginning with the 6 A.M. report. He worked with one female and several males over the course of the war but about two years into the war, they managed to "program" this early computer to break the code.  They knew the first report out every morning was the weather report and this formed the basis of the computers ability to break the daily code.  

Although others get the credit for creating the first computer in 1946, Alan Turing's work showed that he believed one machine could be made to do any well defined task as long as it was appropriately programmed. It was called the "Universal Turing machine" and relied on the stored program which is what most modern devices operate with now a days. Even the technology that came from creating the atom bomb in the Manhattan project was based on that same concept. 

After the war, he continued extending his ideas. Turing was quite fascinated with the interplay between the human thought processes and the development of computerized though and artificial intelligence.  Much of his work in the late 1940's focused on the emerging power of computers during the Cold War and the fight for nuclear supremacy.  In 1950, he published a paper explaining the "Turing test" which was designed to see if the computer could pass as human. In this test, a human would ask questions and based on the answers would determine if the unseen entity was human or a computer. 

It is also interesting that in school, he was more interested in Maths and Science than studying the classics such as Latin and Greek.  He studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge between 1931 and 1934 when he received his degree. Alan obtained a fellowship at Kings College based on his research in probability after he graduated. Soon afterwards, he headed to the United States to work on his PhD at Princeton which he received in 1938.

He came to the attention of others when he published a paper on the Entscheidungsproblem or decision problem which meant that there had to be a way to determine if a certain problem was solvable based on a given mathematical system.  Both he and Church (an American) came to the same conclusion that they are not solvable and Alan's paper lead to his being given the opportunity to work on his Phd under Church. It was his work on this problem that lead to his creation of the Turing machine and the basis of breaking the Enigma code.

Unfortunately, in the mid 1950's an investigation into his house being broken into lead to his being ousted as homosexual and he was convicted of the crime.  He ended up taking the chemical treatment to keep his choice under control and in 1954, he died.  The coroner determined it was suicide due to the cyanide found in his system.  He was only 41 years old and that is so sad because who knows what else he might have contributed if he'd been able to continue working.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.