Alan Turing (1912-1954) was the father of the computer and the one who broke Nazi Germany’s secret code during the Second World War.
War hero: He was no he-man with hair on his chest. He stuttered. But when war came, when the bombs rained down from the skies, when Germans sank ships at sea sending food to England, he is the one who broke Enigma, the secret code of the German high command, a code thought to be unbreakable. He shortened the war by at least two years, saving probably 22 million or so lives. Although Churchill and the king knew he was a war hero, the public did not for 30 years because his work for British intelligence was top secret.
The Universal Turing Machine: Before the war he would lie in a meadow and think about the most powerful computer imaginable. Back then a computer was a person who did mathematical calculations for a living. But his computer would be a machine, one that could not only add, subtract, multiply and divide, but also do calculus and trigonometry and answer any mathematical question put to it.
That brought him to two shocking conclusions:
- The most powerful computer imaginable was amazingly simple in design.
- There would always be mathematical questions it could not answer no matter what.
His computer design:
- An infinite tape
- A reading head – to read and write characters on the tape and to move it forwards and backwards.
- Memory – to remember what it had seen on the tape
- A program – a set of instructions of what to do next with the tape based on what it had read. The program could be read from tape and stored in memory.
All advances in computers since have been about speed, memory, ease of use and programming them to do new things, not about power. At bottom computers are still Turing machines.
After the war Turing helped to make Britain’s first computer. It could play chess and play “God Save the King” but it could not write love letters.
The Turing Test: Turing said we will know computers and humans have equal intelligence when we can no longer tell them apart by talking to them without seeing them. When asked how will we know computers are not just faking it, he said how do we know other humans are not just faking it?
Trial and death: Turing was honest to a fault. When he called the police after his place was robbed, they found out during questioning that he had a male lover. They arrested him for “gross indecency”. Tried and found guilty, the judge gave him a choice: prison or cure. The medicine for the cure did not work. Instead he grew breasts. He could no longer go out in public.
He loved the Disney film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937). So to end it all he ate a poisoned apple.
In 2009 the British government said it was sorry – but to this day it refuses to pardon him for breaking the law.
Postscript: Turing was pardoned at last in 2013.
“Alan Turing and the Apple” (2011) by Peter Crawford
See also:
- computer
- Churchill
- Steve Jobs
- Jacob Bronowski: Knowledge or Certainty
- Archimedes
- Chomsky – says that human language shows that humans are more than Turing machines and therefore computers will never pass us in intelligence
Abagond 
Hehehehe. I’m surprised you didn’t see the other connection. When he created the Turing test, he replaced the woman with a computer. When his body was being warped by female hormones, chemically castrating him and giving him breasts, he fell on hard times. Fell hard.
When
wethe serpent, came to Eve, and offered her the apple she too fell, just as man fell. But by positing convincingly that man and machine should not be considered any different, Turing showed us that we have still have a further way to fall.With Turing as their symbolic Eve claiming that Man can achieve ultimate power through the apple of computationalism, certain , ahem “people”, have set their Trap, and we have all fell for it. By convincing people that they are no different from machines, they have managed to create a completely new narrative for people that allows them to be examined as if they were machines: pop evolutionary psychology (pick up artists), statistical objectivity (HBD) and the complete algorithmization of society (No Child Left Behind, Black-Scholes Equation etc.)
Turing was of course a humanist, I doubt he would have had found postmodernity an appealing situation. The question is, why are we alright with this state of affairs?
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so this is the person that all the racists brag about when they say whites invented computers, somehow those racists dont seem like theyd like this guy very much. Its a shame he had to go through what he did.
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I’ve never knew about his personal life. It was very tragic.
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This article explains very while why all the talk about computers becoming intelligent and self-aware is rubbish. In spite of advancement in microprocessors, software, and support hardware, at the bottom the newest i7 from Intel works no differently than the earliest digital computers. Only people without a clue publish articles on how computer intelligence is right around the corner, unaware that a massive paradigm shift is required.
Also, a true “Turing Test” would focus not on the answers to questions asked of the computer, but on the questions the computer asks.
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People and things I would not have known about.
Tragic end indeed but not alone.
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Joshua – you phool!! Whether or not the people who publish those types of articles are correct is irrelevant. All that is requires is for us to become stupider and more mechanical!
Let me give you an example. I was working at a call center, where I thought that I would be able to use my intuition and knowledge to help people with their computer problems. I was instead, given a fixed script (just as how one would make a Python script), to read without fail or alteration. While I would be helping people according to the dictates of the script, while the computer was booting or taking a while to do something, they would say something like “Wait the laptop’s thinking..”
That’s is
ourtheir Trap.WeThey just have keep on putting out more Deep Blues and Watsons an then one day, you will submit. Its just a matter of time.LikeLike
“In spite of advancement in microprocessors, software, and support hardware, at the bottom the newest i7 from Intel works no differently than the earliest digital computers. Only people without a clue publish articles on how computer intelligence is right around the corner, unaware that a massive paradigm shift is required.”
A Turing machine is not an actual machine, it’s only a theoretical model that was created to determine what could possibly be computed. It is impractical to program a TM to do anything but the simplest operations of arithmetic. So if you mean that actual computers are designed the same way as TMs, then you are wrong. You’re right if you mean that actual computers can’t do anything that TMs can’t do, but you’re wrong if you think that any kind of “paradigm shift” could remedy that.
What the study of TMs shows is that there are problems which CANNOT be computed (except possibly with the aid of magic). Computers can’t do it, and neither can you, me, or any other human or other life form, no matter how intelligent.
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If you enjoy this subject, you might enjoy the novel “Cryptonomicon” by Neal Stephenson.
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Turing didn’t break the Nazi codes, it was Polish code breakers that did it and the allies were also lucky enough to capture Enigma codes from depth charged U boats!
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True, the halting problem is undecidable, but don’t tell that Eliezer Yudowsky and the other people behind much of our modern religions. They believe that the use of halting oracles will solve the halting problem.The more things change…
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That great computer you bought from someone really doesn’t do that much:
http://www.jegerlehner.ch/intel/opcode.html
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The British have tried to take ALL the credit for breaking the Enigma codes. I guess every side has their version of history. For example, Brits get angry at American films such as Saving Private Ryan which ONLY show Americans liberating continental Europe. I guess if you watched a French film then you’d probably only see Frenchmen liberating the continent 🙂
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I like this post. I like learning about these types of subjects. I get tired of reading about race stuff. This one is good. Introduce more topics like these please.
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I read he was chemically castrated for homosexual activities, he ate an apple laced with cyanide. He is being pardoned today. That’s sad he was persecuted in that fashion. He was a war hero and treated in this barbaric fashion.
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I find it hard to believe that people still try to find a reason to hate gay people. I mean, it just isn’t rational to get one’s underwear in a twist about someone else’s love life. In my opinion, love between two consenting adults is just that, love. Or when it isn’t then at least it’s fun, or they wouldn’t do it. That Westboro Baptist Church cr@p… I’m a writer, and I couldn’t make that stuff up.
The pardon for Turing is a populist stunt by a government that has jumped on the gay rights bandwagon for PR value rather than from any genuine concern for the equal rights of gay people. The poor guy was persecuted in an earlier, even more ignorant time than the ignorant time we live in. He should never have got dragged into court for hurting no one. Waste of an outstanding talent.
Homophobia is as stupid as racism, and often practised by the same people.
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@Buddhuu: Amen to that. Merry Christmas.
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FWIW, regarding AI, It seems to me that synthetic intelligence is more likely to happen as a spontaneous, emergent phenomenon from a complex neural network than to be designed in down to the last quasi-neuron or line of code.
As intelligence exists in human wetware, it is obviously physically possible for artificial intelligence to exist. Whether we’ll ever devise it, or devise a system that can give rise to it… who knows.
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Merry Christmas, Mary. 🙂
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