Alan Turing
Alan Turing (born June 23, 1912, London, England—
died June 7, 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire) was a British
mathematician and logician who made major
contributions to mathematics, cryptanalysis, logic,
philosophy, and mathematical biology and also to the
new areas later named computer science, cognitive
science, artificial intelligence, and artificial life.
Early life and career
The son of a civil servant, Turing was educated at a top
private school. He entered the University of Cambridge to
study mathematics in 1931. After graduating in 1934, he
was elected to a fellowship at King’s College (his college
since 1931) in recognition of his research in probability
theory. In 1936 Turing’s seminal paper “On Computable
Numbers, with an Application to the
Entscheidungsproblem [Decision Problem]” was
recommended for publication by the American
mathematical logician Alonzo Church, who had himself
just published a paper that reached the same conclusion
as Turing’s, although by a different method. Turing’s
method (but not so much Church’s) had profound
significance for the emerging science of computing. Later
that year Turing moved to Princeton University to study
for a Ph.D. in mathematical logic under Church’s
direction (completed in 1938).
Alan Turing is well-known for his work on the Enigma
code in World War II, and his theoretical work
underpinning computer science. But he is less well-
known for his pioneering work on one of the great
challenges of biology – how do complex living organisms
develop from tiny collections of cells?
This lecture will discuss Turing’s ground-breaking work in
this area, showing how patterns like a leopard’s spots or
a zebra’s stripes can occur in nature.
Computer designer
In 1945, the war over, Turing was recruited to the
National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London to create an
electronic computer. His design for the Automatic
Computing Engine (ACE) was the first complete
specification of an electronic stored-program all-purpose
digital computer. Had Turing’s ACE been built as he
planned, it would have had vastly more memory than
any of the other early computers, as well as being faster.
However, his colleagues at NPL thought the engineering
too difficult to attempt, and a much smaller machine was
built, the Pilot Model ACE (1950).
The Entscheidungsproblem
What mathematicians called an “effective” method for
solving a problem was simply one that could be carried
by a human mathematical clerk working by rote. In
Turing’s time, those rote-workers were in fact called
“computers,” and human computers carried out some
aspects of the work later done by electronic computers.
The Entscheidungsproblem sought an effective method
for solving the fundamental mathematical problem of
determining exactly which mathematical statements are
provable within a given formal mathematical system and
which are not. A method for determining this is called a
decision method. In 1936 Turing and Church
independently showed that, in general, the
Entscheidungsproblem problem has no resolution,
proving that no consistent formal system of arithmetic
has an effective decision method. In fact, Turing and
Church showed that even some purely logical systems,
considerably weaker than arithmetic, have no effective
decision method. This result and others—notably
mathematician-logician Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness
results—dashed the hopes, held by some
mathematicians, of discovering a formal system that
would reduce the whole of mathematics to methods that
(human) computers could carry out. It was in the course
of his work on the Entscheidungsproblem that Turing
invented the universal Turing machine, an abstract
computing machine that encapsulates the fundamental
logical principles of the digital computer. Artificial
intelligence pioneer
Turing was a founding father of artificial intelligence and
of modern cognitive science, and he was a leading early
exponent of the hypothesis that the human brain is in
large part a digital computing machine. He theorized that
the cortex at birth is an “unorganised machine” that
through “training” becomes organized “into a universal
machine or something like it.” Turing proposed what
subsequently became known as the Turing test as a
criterion for whether an artificial computer is thinking
(1950). In late 2022, the advent of ChatGPT reignited
conversation about the likelihood that the components of
the Turing test had been met.
Last years
Turing was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of
London in March 1951, a high honour, yet his life was
about to become very hard. In March 1952 he was
convicted of “gross indecency”—that is to say,
homosexuality, a crime in Britain at that time—and he
was sentenced to 12 months of hormone “therapy.” Now
with a criminal record, he would never again be able to
work for Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ), the British government’s postwar code-breaking
centre.
Turing spent the remainder of his short career at
Manchester, where he was appointed to a specially
created readership in the theory of computing in May
1953. From 1951 Turing had been working on what is
now known as artificial life. He published “The Chemical
Basis of Morphogenesis” in 1952, describing aspects of
his research on the development of form and pattern in
living organisms. Turing used Manchester’s Ferranti Mark
I computer to model his hypothesized chemical
mechanism for the generation of anatomical structure in
animals and plants.
In the midst of this groundbreaking work, Turing was
discovered dead in his bed, poisoned by cyanide. The
official verdict was suicide, but no motive was
established at the 1954 inquest. His death is often
attributed to the hormone “treatment” he received at the
hands of the authorities following his trial for being gay.
Yet he died more than a year after the hormone doses
had ended, and, in any case, the resilient Turing had
borne that cruel treatment with what his close friend
Peter Hilton called “amused fortitude.” Also, to judge by
the records of the inquest, no evidence at all was
presented to indicate that Turing intended to take his
own life, nor that the balance of his mind was disturbed
(as the coroner claimed). In fact, his mental state
appears to have been unremarkable at the time.
Although suicide cannot be ruled out, it is also possible
that his death was simply an accident, the result of his
inhaling cyanide fumes from an experiment in the tiny
laboratory adjoining his bedroom. Nor can murder by the
secret services be entirely ruled out, given that Turing
knew so much about cryptanalysis at a time when
homosexuals were regarded as threats to national
security.
By the early 21st century Turing’s prosecution for being
gay had become infamous. In 2009 British Prime Minister
Gordon Brown, speaking on behalf of the British
government, publicly apologized for Turing’s “utterly
unfair” treatment. Four years later Queen Elizabeth II
granted Turing a royal pardon.
