Alan Turing: The Father of AI, the Enigma Codebreaker and the Turing Test

Can machines think?  Alan Turing may have shortened the war by cracking Enigma,  but it was answering this question  that may well have been his greatest achievement.  This great, highly informative video from History Extra shows how, as part of a group of mathematicians, Turing imagined machines that could think and solve problems independently of human intervention. This was, of course, more than seven decades ago…

After the war, Turing turned his attention to the possibility of machine intelligence. In 1950, he published his groundbreaking paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he introduced the Turing Test - also known as the "imitation game" - as a way of assessing whether a machine could demonstrate intelligent behaviour. The ideas he explored remain highly relevant in our age of generative AI.  I wonder what he would make of the collage of his life I just requested from an AI model (top)?

Turing’s death by suicide at the age of just 41 reflects the times in which he lived. He was unable to play the imitation game of pretending to the world to be heterosexual and so, despite the accolades for his war-work, he was pursued and prosecuted for being himself. This led to his death.  Later, of course, he would be celebrated as the father of modern computing – I just find it a desperate shame that he died thinking that his reputation was irrecoverably damaged. 

Watch the fascinating video about Turing’s life and achievements below.